Starfell: Willow Moss and the Lost Day
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‘Pardon?’ asked Willow.
‘I believe it may have ended the world.’
Willow sat back, heart jack-hammering in her chest. Finding out that she could have ended the world was, to say the least, a sobering thought.
Moreg, however, seemed back to normal.
‘The thing is, until we know what happened we could just make things worse. Worse than it already is now, and right now it’s about as bad as can be imagined.’
Willow frowned in confusion. ‘What do you mean? I know it’s not … um, great that Tuesday has gone missing, but it’s not the end of the world, surely? It’s just one day …’
A day that no one seems to have missed anyway, so what was the harm, really? thought Willow.
Moreg blinked. ‘Actually, it might be the end of the world if we don’t find it. Whatever happened to last Tuesday may affect the very fabric of Starfell, causing it to unravel slowly, thread by thread.’
Willow’s mouth fell open dumbly as she gasped. She hadn’t realised it could be that serious.
Moreg nodded. ‘Which is why we will have to start at the beginning. We can’t very well proceed until we know for sure what happened. Or, more importantly, why.’
She looked out of the window, frowning slightly, then blinked as if she were trying to clear her vision. ‘There’s someone I think we’re going to need, someone who can help us … which might prove a little tricky as we need to find him first.’
‘Oh, why’s that tricky?’ asked Willow.
Moreg turned to look at her, a faint smile about her lips. ‘He’s an oublier, you see, one of the best in Starfell, no doubt, coming from a long line of them. The problem is that finding an oublier is almost impossible unless you know where to look.’
Willow looked blank. ‘An ouble— A what?’
‘An oublier. It’s in the Old Shel, you see.’ Which Willow had always taken to mean when words had more bits in it. Modern-day Shel was the language most people spoke in Starfell, apart from High Dwarf that is, but the latter was mostly because of all the colourful ways one got to swear. ‘It’s pronounced oo-blee-hair, or – as they are more commonly known today – forgotten tellers, people who see the past.’
‘Like the opposite of a seer?’
Moreg drummed her chin with her fingers. ‘Sort of—’
‘Like my mother,’ interrupted Willow, whose mother was a well-known seer, and took her travelling fair all across the kingdom of Shelagh telling fortunes.
Moreg seemed to have something stuck in her throat because she answered with a strained voice. ‘Er, yes, like your mother. Though most people who call themselves “seers” and say that they can see the future have no idea how it is really done, and often claim to have some connection to the “other side”, to the dead, who supposedly let them know when things are about to occur,’ she said with a disbelieving sniff. ‘True seers are, of course, very rare. But they have been known to read patterns in the smallest events, allowing them to see possible versions of the future. For instance, if they see a particular flower blooming in winter when it usually blooms in spring they can work out that a typhoon is coming in the summer.’
Willow stared blankly.
Moreg continued, ‘Unless they somehow encourage the last tree sparrow to build its nest before midnight on the spring equinox, for example. Do you understand?’
Willow made a kind of nod, mostly because it seemed like it was expected. But she didn’t really understand at all.
Moreg continued, not noticing Willow’s confusion. ‘Forgotten tellers, on the other hand, read people’s memories of the past, which come to them like visions when other people are around. They are, alas, rather unpopular compared to seers, and have very few friends, as you can imagine …’
Willow was puzzled. ‘Why’s that?’
‘Well, seers should be unpopular too. No one wants to be around someone who can predict their death … Yet so very few of them really can predict such things – so they make excellent friends as they always tell you just what you’d like to hear. Forgotten tellers, on the other hand, seldom, if ever, tell you what you’d actually like to hear. They tell things most people would prefer to forget, things you may wish to pretend never happened …’
Willow’s eyes bulged. ‘Really?’
Moreg nodded. ‘Oh yes. Take poor old Hercule Sometimes, a powerful forgotten teller. He was found drowned in a well after he walked past the Duke of Dittany and embarrassed him in front of the captain of the king’s army. The duke had been boasting that he had fantastic natural archery skills, and that the very first time he’d used a bow and arrow he’d hit the bull’s-eye. Apparently Hercule stopped in his tracks, slapped his knee, started chortling and said, “You mean when you fell over backwards in a field after you’d released the arrow and poked a bull in the eye with your bow?”’ Moreg chuckled. ‘See, he’d seen the duke’s memory of the day and, well, the duke was less than impressed, as you can imagine …’
‘But why did he tell the duke?’ gasped Willow.
Moreg’s lips twitched. ‘Couldn’t help himself – forgotten tellers see things as if they just happened. And they often blurt it out before they realise. They aren’t stupid – they’re just not always aware of what happens to them when they’re having a vision. Making for rather awkward social situations. As a result very few oubliers have lived to tell their tales and have an alarming capacity for turning up buried beneath people’s floorboards or at the bottom of wells. They often carry their own food for fear of being poisoned. They’re deeply suspicious of gatherings of people, partly because they get flooded with other people’s memories, and partly because the more visions they have the more chance they have of getting themselves into trouble by offending people. So the few that have survived are virtually hermits, who start running the minute they see anyone approaching …’
‘Oh,’ said Willow with a frown. ‘How are we going to find one, then, if they’re impossible to find?’
‘Tricky, I said,’ grinned Moreg. ‘But not impossible, if you know where to start.’
‘And you do?’
‘Oh yes. I’ve found in life that sometimes it’s useful to look back a little, to see when you need to go forward.’
‘Huh?’
‘We’re going to visit his last known address.’
‘Oh,’ said Willow, blinking at the ominous use of ‘we’.
‘I think you may need to pack a bag.’
‘Oh dear,’ Willow whispered.
Meanwhile, far away in a hidden stone fortress, where no magic had been able to penetrate for a thousand years, a figure stood alone in the tower and waited.
Waited for the raven, and the message that could lead to his downfall, betraying his plans before he was ready to seize power.
There were shadows beneath his eyes; sleep was a tonic he could ill afford.
But no raven came this day. Just as it hadn’t come the day before.
At last he allowed himself to breathe a sigh of relief; at last he allowed himself to believe. It had worked.
He put the box inside his robes, keeping it close to his heart. It had done its job well. Never again would he let the witch get the better of him.
He left the tower, and found his faithful followers waiting on the winding stone staircase for the news. ‘She can’t remember?’ asked one, his face dark, hidden behind the hood of his robe. ‘Does that mean she won’t be coming?’
He gave a low, mirthless laugh. ‘Oh, she will. I have no doubt of that. But this time I will be ready.’
3
The Monster from Under the Bed
Willow spent the next quarter of an hour trying not to picture the look on her father’s face when he got home from his job as a farm manager for Leighton Apples and found her gone. Moreg, meanwhile, explored the Mosses’ ‘fascinating cottage garden’ in an attempt to give Willow a moment to pack in privacy.
In her small bedroom, which she shared with Camille, Willow took down Granny Flossy’s old green shaggy-hair carpetbag from atop the cupboard; it was made from the long hairs of a Nach mountain goat. Willow had often wondered if it was age that had turned it green, or if there really were green mountain goats …
Willow tried to think of what she might need.
She’d never spent the night away from the cottage before, not even to go to one of her mother’s travelling fairs. She’d somehow always been too young or, when she was old enough, too established as the ‘sensible one’ – which translated as ‘the one who was better suited to look after her father and Granny Flossy’.
Not that she minded looking after Granny. They looked after each other really. The two had been a pair since she’d come to live with them the year Willow turned five. Willow’s father was sometimes a bit embarrassed by his formerly famous mother, whose potions had once been highly sought commodities, but which now mostly exploded in clouds of coloured smoke that left rat tails on the ceiling.
He tried to forbid her from making them, and tried locking away her supplies. He didn’t seem to notice how Granny Flossy’s shoulders slumped whenever he reprimanded her, or how much it hurt her when he treated her like a child. Willow knew, though, just like she knew where he hid the key. It was why Granny brewed most of her potions in secret in the attic when he was gone. Willow and Granny spent most of their days there together, with Willow trying her best to ensure that Granny’s potions didn’t blow up the roof again. And even though Camille said that the pair were perfectly matched because Willow’s magic was rather humdrum and Granny’s was rather disastrous, she didn’t mind. Somehow that made things better, not worse.
But now, as a result of being at home with Granny Flossy all these years, her ‘worldly’ experience was rather limited, to say the least, and she had absolutely no idea what someone was supposed to take on a potentially dangerous adventure. Moreg had told her that they might be gone for a week, or two, if everything went according to plan, and that it was best for the moment not to say anything about what they were really doing in case her parents came tearing after them (which might make saving the world harder than it needed to be).
Willow’s sensible side had come up with a few objections. Like, why, for instance, she had the questionable luck of being home alone when the most feared witch in all of Starfell came knocking? Or the fact that this plan meant that no one knew where she was going, or, more importantly, who she was with …? A rather fearsome who as it turned out.
But ‘no’ didn’t seem a word Moreg Vaine often heard. So Willow had said yes, partly because she was a bit too afraid to say no, but also because it sounded like a pretty serious problem, so shouldn’t she try to help … if she could? But mainly she’d said yes because hadn’t she always secretly wished for something like this? Even that morning while she was hanging up her sisters’ underwear on the line she had wished that she could go somewhere exciting just once, somewhere beyond the Mosses’ cottage walls, and do something that didn’t involve finding Jeremiah Crotchett’s teeth. But, as Granny Flossy always said, wishes are dangerous things, especially when they come true. Which was why, now, she was a bit worried that this was a bit more adventure than she’d bargained for …
Willow looked at her belongings and frowned. She probably needed more than just an extra pair of socks?
It took her another five minutes to gather everything she might need, which coincidentally amounted to everything she owned:
Briefly she wondered why almost everything she owned was a rather unfortunate shade of green. She then stood thinking for a minute, her fingers drumming her chin, trying to make up her mind: should she, or shouldn’t she? Then she knelt down, and after a bit of scrambling she pulled out the monster who lived under the bed, clasping him firmly by his long tail. This was to his absolute horror, which sounded like this: ‘Oh no! Oh, me greedy aunt! A pox on you from all of the kobolds!’ and she put him alongside her worldly belongings.
‘Monster’ was a bit of a stretch. Oswin was, in fact, a kobold, a species that only just fell into the classification of monster. But it was best not to tell Oswin this as he was very proud of his monster heritage.
Through groggy slits that exposed luminous orange eyes that hadn’t seen daylight for several weeks Oswin was glaring at her now. His lime-green fur was turning a ripe pumpkin colour in his outrage and his bright green-and-white striped tail electrified with indignation.
‘Wot choo go and do that for? Grabbing peoples by the tail? Is that any way to treat a body? No respect … and me being the last kobold and all!’ he muttered darkly. Then he scratched a shaggy ear with a long, slightly rusty claw and grumbled, ‘I ’ave ’alf a mind to leave … Specially after I got you them awfully resistible feet thingamababies, which you never even fanked me for,’ he pointed out with a deep hard-done-by sniff.
Oswin was always a bit cross, so Willow ignored this.
The ‘thingamababies’ that he referred to were her next-door neighbour Mrs Crone-Barrow’s ancient, rather dead-looking bunny slippers. Willow had made the mistake of muttering one night that her toes were cold, so Oswin had gone next door and prised the prehistoric slippers from the old woman’s sticky, corn-crusted feet with a butter knife. Willow had woken up to the feeling of something warm, wet and icky attached to her feet, followed very closely by the sound of her own screaming when she realised what it was. She still shuddered at the memory.
Despite this, there was the faint, very faint, chance Oswin might come in handy on an adventure thought Willow. He was really good at spotting magical ability, as well as detecting lies, and his thick kobold blood allowed him to resist most forms of magic. He was also her only friend, and who would remember to feed him when she was gone?
Oswin, despite his threat, had made no attempt to leave and was now taking care of some morning monster ablutions: checking his fur for any stray bugs and polishing his teeth with a corner of Willow’s bedcover. In fact, Oswin had been threatening to leave the relative comfort beneath Willow’s bed ever since Willow first caught him three years ago. ‘Caught’ being the operative word, like an infection.
Willow had been called to the Jensens’ farmhouse to deal with a case of a missing monster, wondering on the way over why the Jensens would want to find a monster … She decided not to think about it too much because, as her father always said, spurgles don’t grow without fertiliser. But when she arrived and Mrs Jensen pointed to the stove, squealing, ‘It’s in there …!’ Willow had been a little confused.
‘What’s in there?’
‘The monster, of course.’
Willow had frowned. ‘But, Mrs Jensen,’ she’d replied, ‘I can’t deal with monsters!’
‘You have to – you’re a witch and … he’s lost … Isn’t that what you do, find things?’
‘But … how can he be lost if he’s right there?’
It turned out that the Jensens knew he was a lost monster because Oswin had told them so shortly before he took up refuge in the stove. He refused to come out or to tell them where he was from for that matter. Later Willow would find out that this was a sore point, as he and his fellow kobolds had been banished from their home and scattered throughout Starfell due to a bit of thievery on the part of his aunt Osbertrude.
But Willow hadn’t known any of that when she’d taken him from the Jensens’ stove. She’d figured that if he really was ‘lost’, it couldn’t hurt to try ‘finding’ him with her magic, using these precise words:
‘I Summon the lost monster currently residing in the Jensens’ stove in Grinfog, the kingdom of Shelagh, Starfell.’
It didn’t hurt to be precise about such things just in case there were any other Jensens in any other parts of the world who also had lost monsters to contend with.
And Oswin had arrived into her outstretched arms with an orange plop. He was the size of a large and fluffy tabby cat, but one who glowered at her with cat-like fury. In fact, if you didn’t know better, and you were really quite stupid, you might mistake Oswin for a cat. To be sure, there were the pointed ears, the fluffy fur and the very stripy tail. He even (to his shame) had white paws, which made him look very tabby-like indeed. All cat-tastic really, except that he was green (when he wasn’t cross, which was seldom), with very sharp monstery claws, the rather persistent smell of boiled cabbage, the stealing, the ease with which kobolds got offended, and the unfortunate truth that occasionally, when they were offended enough, they exploded. Which isn’t great when they live under your bed. Oh, and the fact that he could talk – you don’t get many tabby cats that can chat.
And once Oswin was ‘found’ he was determined to stay that way … choosing to stay with Willow from then on and showing his appreciation for his new home under Willow’s bed by bringing her ‘presents’ from the neighbours. Which wasn’t good for business. Especially if your clients found out that the person who found their lost things also seemed to be the one who took them in the first place.
Willow cleared her throat. ‘Listen, Oswin, apparently Tuesday has gone missing … and we are going to help Moreg Vaine to find it.’ Then, because she felt that perhaps it was the right thing to do, she added, ‘Er … you may want to pack a bag.’
Oswin turned tangerine; his eyes bulged to the size of tennis balls. ‘Wot? We?’ His catty lips silently mouthed the words ‘Moreg Vaine’ and his fur-covered body turned from carroty orange to a rather ill-looking shade of green like pea soup. ‘Wot choo go and sign us up for a rumble with a madwoman for? Vicious witch, she eats peoples! She pickles children in ginger! Makes candles with yer earwax! And she blew up me cousin Osloss when he found ’imself in ’er pantry! Don’t even think about it! I aren’t going, nohow, no way! Staying right here … I’s got me a duty to stay as the last kobold anyhow,’ he said, glowering at Willow, his claws digging into the bedcover in stubborn revolt.
Willow sighed, then snatched him by the tail once more, and shoved him into the hairy carpetbag. ‘Never mind all that,’ she said dismissively, ignoring his hissing and muttering. She knew that kobolds blew up regularly, with or without a witch’s help, and usually survived relatively unscathed. ‘You’re coming; now stop your grumbling.’
It was a little worrying, though, that rumours of Moreg Vaine even terrified the monster population.
Oswin sat in the bag with a huff, muttering darkly while Willow turned to the task at hand. The blue horseshoe scarf.
Would she need it? Was it necessary? Or was that really beside the point?
It was pretty, expensive and didn’t actually belong to her. It belonged to her middle sister, Camille, who had received it from one of her many admirers. Knowing that Camille would be furious when she saw the scarf gone gave Willow a grim satisfaction that only those with older siblings understood. So she packed it in the bag along with everything else, closed her bedroom door and set the hairy bag down on top of the kitchen table with a thud (to Oswin’s outrage). She decided at the last minute to add a half loaf of bread and her mug.
Then, fighting mounting panic, she scribbled her father a note:
Dear Dad,
Tuesday has gone missing
The witch Moreg has asked for my help
The witch Moreg has need of my skill – yes, really
She scribbled over her first attempt and discarded it in the wastebasket when she remembered that honesty wasn’t what they were going for. Not that he would believe her anyway … Then she tried again.
Dear Dad,
I’ve gone to help Mum and the girls at the travelling fair, sorry.
There is half a roast chicken in the icebox, and a loaf of bread under the tea towel.
If I’m not back in a week, please visit Wheezy for me. He likes the red Leighton apples, and won’t be fooled by the green gumbos.
Love,
Willow
Leaving the note on the kitchen table, she tried not to think of what her father would say when he got home. Or what he would do to her when he realised that she wasn’t with her mother and sisters at the travelling fair. There was no point in thinking about it.
Borrowed trouble. That’s what her dad called it. He always said that the god Wol provided enough daily things to worry about and there was no use borrowing tomorrow’s troubles as well. Though Willow doubted he’d appreciate her using his own logic against him.
Green hairy bag in hand, she whispered a warning to Oswin to keep quiet or she’d hand him over to Moreg Vaine for her ginger pickling, and with slightly trembling knees she closed the cottage door.
‘Ready?’ asked Moreg, who eyed the bag with some surprise, though she didn’t comment.
Willow definitely didn’t feel ready.
4
The Portal Pantry
As Willow followed the witch down the lane, leaving the cottage behind, there was a small part of her that wished one of her sisters – preferably Camille – would walk past just then. She thought how nice it would be to tell her that the most revered witch in all of Starfell needed her help.
But of course they passed no one. They walked along the winding dirt road that led away from Grinfog and its rolling fields and orchards. It forked left towards the shadowy woods that loomed on the horizon – woods that Willow had always been encouraged to stay out of.