Heart of Valor - V1 Dec 2004 Read online

  L J SMITH

  HEART of VALOR

  By the same author

  The Night of the Solstice

  MACMILLAN PUBLISHING COMPANY

  New York

  COLLIER MACMILLAN CANADA

  Toronto

  MAXWELL MACMILLAN INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING GROUP New York Oxford Singapore Sydney

  Copyright (c) 1990 by L. J. Smith

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and

  retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Macmillan Publishing Company

  866 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022

  Collier Macmillan Canada, Inc.

  1200 Eglinton Avenue East

  Suite 200

  Don Mills, Ontario M3C 3N1

  First Edition Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The text of this book is set in 12 point Electra.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Smith, L. J. (Lisa J.)

  Heart of valor / by L. ). Smith.—1st ed. p. cm.

  Summary: When their friend, sorceress Morgana Shee, embarks on a

  mission to recover the Heart of Valor, a ruby giving the possessor

  almost limitless power, four children already in serious danger

  pursue her to offer their help. Sequel to “Night of the Solstice.”

  ISBN 0-02-785861-8

  [1. Fantasy 2 Brothers and sisters—Fiction.] I Title

  PZ7.S65?7He 1990 [Fie!—dc20 90-5827 CIP AC

  To my parents,

  whose love, support, and example

  have helped me find my dreams

  CONTENT

  ONE - Claudia Sends a Letter …

  TWO - … And Janie Receives It

  THREE - In Fell Andred

  FOUR - Talisman

  FIVE - Charles Loses His Temper

  SIX - Alys Has a Dream

  SEVEN - The Dark Thing

  EIGHT - The Second Dream

  NINE - Down in the Dark

  TEN - Outside the Wards

  ELEVEN - Besieged

  TWELVE - Journey North

  THIRTEEN - The Wild Hunt

  FOURTEEN - A Savage Place

  FIFTEEN - The Old Straight Track

  SIXTEEN - The Archon

  SEVENTEEN - Mirror of Heaven

  EIGHTEEN - The Weerul Council

  NINETEEN - Midsummer Day

  ONE

  Claudia Sends a Letter

  Claudia Hodges-Bradley twisted a strand of mouse brown hair around her fingers and frowned mightily, trying to concentrate on Mrs. Anderson’s review of this week’s spelling words. There would be a test this afternoon, and Mrs. Anderson’s tests always gave Claudia stomach cramps. She knew she needed to pay attention … but she would rather just listen to the birds.

  Not that birds, in general, had a great deal to say for themselves. They could sit happily for hours shrieking, “I’m a bluejay! I’m a bluejay! This is my tree! This is my tree!” So it wasn’t that they were very interesting, just much more interesting than school or Mrs. Anderson.

  At a steely glance from that lady Claudia jumped guiltily and stopped twisting her hair. Mrs. Anderson disapproved of hair twisting, pencil chewing, and nail biting, all of which Claudia seemed to be doing more of this year than ever before. Claudia was a square, serious child, whose blue eyes always looked a little anxious in class pictures. This year they usually seemed to look that way in the mirror, too.

  Since she couldn’t twist her hair, she put a hand to her chest to feel the comforting bump of the charm beneath her shirt. It was so familiar she could see it with her fingers: the broad crescent of silver from which hung three stones: sar donyx, black opal, and bloodstone, each inscribed with spidery writing in the language of the Wildworld. Claudia couldn’t read any of the symbols on the stones, but she understood very well what the charm did. It enabled her to talk to animals.

  Perhaps communicate was a better word than talk. Animal language depended as much on body movement—the tilt of a head, the flip of a wing, the quirk of a tail—as it did on mere sounds. Except when the message was meant to be heard and understood over long distances, like the killdeer outside daring anyone to come close to her nest… .

  Claudia sucked in her breath sharply. The killdeer had been saying something quite different for several minutes now, and Claudia had just realized what it was. Automatically, she started to raise her hand to tell Mrs. Anderson, then hastily snatched the hand down again. The teacher would think she had gone crazy. Better just to wait it out. After all, there was nothing Mrs. Anderson could do about it. And maybe—Claudia brightened considerably—they wouldn’t get to the spelling test this afternoon.

  And then her breath stopped, and her heart underneath the silver charm began to pound violently. Because it was the last week of April and the spring canned-food drive was almost over, and Mrs. Anderson’s class was winning. And the tower they had made with their 246 (as of this morning) cans of food rose high in all its symmetrical splendor against the wall on one side of the room.

  Claudia could just see it out of the corner of her eye without turning her head. Remmy Garcia was sitting a foot or so away from it. Claudia liked Remmy. He kept white rats at home. She didn’t much like Beth Ann, who sat behind him, but as her sister Alys would say, that was beside the point.

  “Claudia!”

  Claudia started. She had twisted around in her seat to look at the cans; now she turned her agonized gaze back on Mrs. Anderson.

  “Claudia, if you want to stare at your little friend, recess is the time to do it—except that you just lost five minutes of your recess. Do you understand?”

  Claudia scarcely heard the titters of the class. She had to do something to stop what was going to happen, but she had not the first idea what. Even Alys, who was a junior in high school and could fix almost anything, couldn’t fix something like this. But still, she felt a strong compulsion to tell Alys… . No. Not Alys. Janie.

  Janie might be able to help. Janie did all sorts of strange things these days. Most of them were of no use whatsoever, but some were. Feverishly, Claudia began rummaging in her desk for pencil and paper. She would write a letter to Janie.

  “Claudia! Claudia Hodges-Bradley!” Claudia dropped the pencil. Mrs. Anderson was staring as though she couldn’t believe her eyes.

  “Claudia, if you would just learn to pay attention, school wouldn’t be so difficult for you. Now you’ve lost ten minutes of recess.”

  As the teacher turned back to the blackboard Claudia stealthily picked up the pencil again. She would have to be very careful; if she lost the last five minutes of recess she would have no way of sending the letter. She wrote with her eyes glued to Mrs. Anderson’s back, only snatching a peek at the paper now and then. Writing was hard work for Claudia under any circumstances, and spelling a hopeless task even when she wasn’t rattled. Letters seemed to have a life of their own, jumping in and out of words and turning themselves upside down. When the note was finished she surveyed it doubtfully. She felt almost certain towwer was misspelled. But Janie was very smart, she told herself comfortingly. Janie would understand.

  The recess bell rang. Claudia sat for ten minutes under the forbidding eye of Mrs. Anderson, trying not to twist her hair.

  Dismissed at last, she burst out onto the blacktop already scanning the perimeter of the playground. There were lots of dogs in Villa Park and usually one or two could be seen gamboling on the other side of the chain-link fen
ce. Yes— there! But it was so far away, on the other side of the big kids’ playground.

  Claudia, a third grader, was not allowed on that playground. She didn’t know what they did to you if they caught you there—possibly suspended you as they had suspended Tony Stowers for hitting another little boy over the head with a bag of marbles. Probably sent you to the principal. She cast a glance at the teacher on yard duty, saw he was looking the other way, and began to slink.

  She felt horribly exposed, the only child on an endless field of forbidden grass, and when she reached the fence she hunkered down, making herself as small as possible. She whistled. The dog, a sort of setter-spaniel mix with something vaguely Airedale about the ears, stopped scratching itself and looked surprised. It recovered quickly and trotted over, wagging its whole body and uttering short, sharp barks in an attempt to tell her how eager it was to do whatever she wanted it to do, how proud it was to have been chosen to do it, how valiantly it would try to accomplish the task, how—

  “Be quiet,” said Claudia, desperately. The dog groveled. “I need you to help me. You know who I am?”

  The setter rolled eyes like chocolate drops expressively. Everyone knew Claudia.

  “All right, well, I’ve got a sister—not my biggest sister, Alys, but the other one, Janie. She goes to the junior high school—the place across the street with lots of kids. You know that place?”

  The setter knew it perfectly. Pizza in the cafeteria trash cans, rats under the Quonset huts, and gophers in the field. A wonderful place.

  “Well, I need you to go there and find Janie and give her this note. Janie is—” Claudia stopped, overwhelmed by the task of trying to describe Janie in terms the setter would understand.

  The dog raised its head off its paws and barked once, wriggling in delight. It knew Janie, too. Threw away half her lunch and smelled like magic. Nothing easier than to find her.

  “Oh, thank you!” said Claudia, pushing her hand through a diamond of the chain-link to touch its wet nose. Then she carefully folded the note and poked it through.

  “Now, go! Please hurry.” As the dog trotted away, letter in its teeth, tail high, pride in its commission showing in every line of its body, the bell rang again. Recess was over.

  And Claudia was an ocean of grass away from her rightful place. Her only hope was to hug the older kids’ classrooms and get back to her room through the middle of the school.

  There was, she discovered at once, a fatal flaw in this plan. Barring the way between the intermediate and the primary wings of the school was a chain-link gate. It was not locked, but Claudia knew she would never have the courage to touch it, much less open it. Besides, there was a teacher on the other side—her year-before-last-year’s teacher, Mr. Pigeon.

  Mr. Pigeon had been a nice teacher. He had never made her name sound like “Clod-ia” or told her her writing looked like chicken tracks or her attitude was terrible. His class motto had been “All for one and one for all.” Claudia sniffled as she turned to go the other way.

  Mr. Pigeon heard. He turned around, surprised.

  “Claudia, what—?” But instead of finishing the question he looked hard at her face. Then he put a finger to his lips and opened the gate, beckoning her through.

  “All for one …” he whispered, as she looked up at him in dumb gratitude. “Better hurry. But don’t run!”

  Claudia walked until she was out of eyeshot, then galloped. She managed to slide into her chair just as Mrs. Anderson turned around to announce a spelling test. And then there was nothing to do but sit, pencil clutched in her fist, stomach aching, unable to ignore the killdeer outside. It was shrieking the same thing as before, over and over:

  “Earthquake! Earthquake! “Ground move, ground shake!”

  From somewhere a chaffinch added a note in counterpoint: “Take wing! Take wing!”

  Claudia wished she could. It was all up to Janie now.

  TWO

  And Janie Receives It

  I’d like a volunteer to tell us the answer to the last two equations here … Janie Hodges-Bradley.”

  Janie, who had not volunteered, looked up from her eighth-grade algebra textbook, blinked, and scanned the blackboard quickly, once. “X equals seven or negative seven, y equals thirteen or negative thirteen.”

  Mr. Lambert pursed his lips, tapped the chalk once or twice on the board, and spread his free hand in a sort of grudging shrug. “Correct,” he said, and he and Janie exchanged a glance. He knew she was reading another book behind her text, and it grieved him, but as long as she knew the answers he would let her get away with it. He might have been surprised—and much less aggrieved—if he had known that the book was Modern Trigonometry. There were a surprisingly large number of calculations to be done in magic.

  This was the first year Janie had been glad of her mother’s refusal to let her skip a grade or three when the elementary school had wanted it so long ago. Because if she studied calculus during algebra period, German and Latin during Spanish, herb lore during history, metamorphic petrology during art, and the collected writings of Darion the Falcrister during literature; and stayed up late every night, she could just about get through the course of study Morgana Shee had set for her. Just about. It wasn’t easy, but it was possible.

  Janie bent her head once more over her books. She was only alerted to the presence of the dog by the stifled giggles and hisses of the other students. When she noticed it, it was just finishing a quick circuit of the room and heading straight for her as if it had known her all its life. Reaching her, it planted muddy front paws on her lap and thrust its head against her chest, nearly knocking her out of her seat. Then it raised its head and barked once, joyously, in her face.

  “Look,” said someone, mildly. “Janie Hodges-Bradley has a dog.”

  Two seats away, Bliss Bascomb turned a silvery blond head. “Janie Hodges-Bradley is a dog,” she whispered, and there was laughter, and then Mr. Lambert intervened.

  “Someone remove that animal,” he said, waving an eraser dismissively.

  Janie sat with her hands pressed on her knees as the dog was dragged away. She did this partly to quell the desire to do violence to Bliss Bascomb, and partly because of what no one else had seen: the dog had deposited a small, wet wad of paper in her lap. When everyone’s attention was safely on the lesson again she unfolded the paper.

  After studying it for several minutes she rubbed her eyes, and tried again. The note had suffered considerably since Claudia had written it. It looked as if it had been dropped once or twice in the gutter, and parts of the paper were entirely disintegrated by canine saliva. What was left of the writing bore a pronounced resemblance to chicken tracks. “Deere Janie,” “drids,” and “rthkwack” were about all she could make out.

  Although the signature had been obliterated she had no doubt as to the author. For one thing, it was on elementary-school paper, the kind with the three big lines; and for another, who else would send a letter via dog? And Claudia must have thought it was important, because she knew Janie would hate to be interrupted at school.

  For a moment Janie was tempted to ignore the whole thing; pretend she hadn’t got the letter, or that she had thought it was a joke. A year before, she would certainly have done this. But now … well, she was annoyed with Claudia, but she couldn’t just let it rest. There was some kind of trouble afoot.

  Janie sighed, eyed the students around her surreptitiously, and reached down to unzip her backpack.

  She drew out a stick. It was rowan, exactly as long as the distance between the tips of her fingers and the crook of her elbow, and sanded to a finish like satin. It had been hollowed out and filled with cinquefoil, agrimony, and other herbs. To this had been added a rolled-up parchment on which Morgana Shee had written in the language of Findahl, the Wildworld, and a piece of white cotton stained with three drops of Janie’s blood and three drops of Morgana’s. It was a virtue wand, drawing power from the Gold Staff of the sorceress to the hand of her apprent
ice.

  But it had never been intended to do what Janie meant it to do now. She looked around again. She habitually sat in the back of class; it was easier to read books behind her text that way, but it was still hard to be inconspicuous with a piece of wood over a foot long. She rubbed the surface of her desk with her sleeve to clean it. A mirror would have been ideal, but any reflective surface would do. Then, when Mr. Lambert turned his back to demonstrate an equation on the board, she pulled out the rowan wand and rapidly drew a near-perfect circle on the desk, leaving only a tiny break in the line near the top.

  By now the girls on either side were regarding her as if she had gone mad. Janie cupped her arms protectively around the circle and gave them a killing look. When they turned away she placed her left thumb precisely to bridge the gap in the circle, clasped the rowan stick with her right hand, breathed directly on the center, and murmured four short words.

  Instantly she felt a tremendous rush of heat. The line she had inscribed flared translucent red, as if she had opened a very thin window onto fire. There was a puff of heat against her face and the center of the desk seemed to drop out. Janie stared, appalled. A visioning circle was not supposed to be like this. Instead of being crystal clear and silvery, this circle was murkily red, shot through with cadaverous cracks of green. Shapes moved blurrily, sluggishly, inside it, but it was impossible to make anything out. For a moment Janie wondered wildly if she’d managed to cast a circle into Hell, or Betelguese, or some other equally improbable place, and then something vaguely familiar swam into her field of vision. Two dark spots that might, with a little imagination, be turned into eyes, a paler prominence of nose between them. Below, a large black O of a mouth. Wide open—in horror, seemingly. A face. And, yes, definitely familiar. She’d done it. She’d managed to hook into Claudia.

  *

  Claudia nearly bit the eraser off her pencil when the top of her desk turned red. Paralyzed, she stared into the copper-colored circle, which was full of moving things like the ghosts on a TV with very, very bad reception—or like things in certain dreams which Claudia had never told anyone about and never would. Then she slid her spelling paper farther out of the way and saw Janie’s face, pale green in the strange light, and she went limp with relief.