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  Cade stood spellbound. He didn’t think he’d ever seen anything more beautiful.

  ‘Who are they?’ he whispered.

  Phineal smiled. ‘My brother clam-tenders,’ he said.

  · CHAPTER TWELVE ·

  CADE GAZED AT the skycraft. All of them were beautiful, but for him, it was a sleek, mid-sized vessel that was the most beautiful of all.

  It had been carved into the shape of a snowbird. The prow was the head, with a long pointed beak and almond-shaped eyes, which had been painted with gleaming black lacquer. The body was slender, and a scalloped tracery of feathers had been etched into the surface of the wood – a pattern repeated in the stitching of the white sails that billowed from its mast.

  Its rider sat tall in the saddle, his hands adjusting the sail ropes and flight weights with such fluid expertise that it looked as though he was not merely flying the skycraft, but was a part of it. Like Phineal, he was a webfoot, but instead of Phineal’s slight stature and greenish colouring, this goblin was powerfully built and had scales of a pale, blueish-white.

  As Cade continued to watch, the webfoot lowered one sail and raised the flight weights on the port side, bringing the skycraft down through the air in a descending spiral towards the edge of the lake. Two or three strides above the surface of the water, he lowered the second sail and released his anchor stone – a smooth round boulder with a tether rope threaded through the hole at its centre. The rock splashed into the water, sank to the muddy bottom of the lake and held the skycraft fast.

  The snowbird was the last of the twelve vessels to descend, and it now hovered above the surface of the lake along with the rest. The white webfoot swung his leg over the saddle and dropped down into the water beside it, then waded ashore.

  Phineal turned to Cade and Celestia. ‘These are friends of mine from the four lakes,’ he said. ‘I have much I must tell them . . .’

  Cade nodded. He understood that this meant the webfoot wanted to talk to his fellow clam-tenders in private.

  ‘They must be hungry,’ said Celestia.

  ‘I expect they are,’ said Phineal. ‘I caught some fish and lake-prawns earlier . . .’

  Cade smiled. ‘Then we’ll go and fetch some provisions from my store to go with them. Come on, Celestia. And you, Tug.’

  Tug turned. He had been as fascinated as Cade by the beautiful skycraft descending out of the night sky, and could hardly tear his gaze away from their webfoot riders. For their part, the webfoots hung back in the shallows, their crests glowing a nervous green at the sight of Cade’s monstrous companion. Cade and Celestia each took an arm and guided Tug along the shore towards the cabin.

  At the veranda, Tug grunted a ‘good night’ and ducked underneath it, then lay down on the mattress of meadow grass beside the sleeping Rumblix. Cade and Celestia climbed the cabin stairs. At the top, Cade turned and looked back.

  He saw Phineal limping over to the gathering of webfoots, his crest bright crimson in greeting. Celestia followed Cade’s gaze.

  ‘Clam-tenders,’ she mused. ‘I know about clam-tenders. My father told me all about the webfoot goblins of Four Lakes – and the Great Blueshell Clam they once nurtured. Now there are clam-tenders here.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Tell me, Cade, is there a Great Blueshell Clam in the Farrow Lake?’

  Cade swallowed. He felt his face redden. Phineal had asked him not to mention the presence of the clam, but he wasn’t about to lie to so direct a question from his friend. Besides, it was Phineal himself who had roused Celestia’s suspicions.

  ‘Yes,’ he said simply.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Have you seen it?’ Celestia asked him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Cade again. ‘Phineal showed me, but he asked me not to tell anyone.’

  There was another pause.

  ‘We’d better see about those provisions,’ said Celestia, and with that she spun round on her heel and marched towards the door of the cabin. Cade watched her back miserably. He’d let her down, he knew he had. He’d as good as told her he didn’t trust her. But then, with her hand resting on the latch, she hesitated. She turned back to Cade. ‘I’d have done exactly the same as you,’ she told him simply.

  Cade lit the storeroom lantern and looked around. It was better stocked than ever, he noted proudly as Celestia inspected the bulging sacks, full crates, and hooks and shelves laden with the produce he’d laid down. The Deepwoods was a wild, dangerous place but, if tended with care and hard work, it could be incredibly bountiful.

  ‘Some of these,’ Celestia announced, taking down a string of glimmer-onions. She was carrying a wicker basket she’d unhooked from the back of the door. ‘And some of these. And some of this. And this. And this . . .’ Sourbeets, nibblick, water-fennel and a large blue cabbage joined the glimmer-onions in the basket.

  Cade picked up a small sack of wild barley that he’d harvested, winnowed and stored earlier that year. And a box of oakapples.

  ‘And what about some of this?’ Celestia asked, her hand resting on an earthenware flagon of winesap.

  Cade frowned. ‘Phineal only drinks water,’ he said.

  Celestia shrugged. ‘I don’t,’ she said, and rested the flagon on the top of Cade’s box of oakapples. ‘Besides,’ she added, ‘this is a special occasion.’

  Cade didn’t argue.

  They left the storeroom and headed through the cabin. Back on the veranda, Cade stopped. Ahead of him, Celestia was striding across the decking, switching her heavy basket from one hand to the other, and was about to descend the stairs, when Cade called out to her.

  ‘Wait, Celestia,’ he said, his voice soft but urgent.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Celestia. ‘I don’t—’

  Cade pointed over at Phineal’s camp.

  The webfoots had been busy. Already, two more of the conical snakeskin tents had been erected, and a couple of webfoots were working together to put up a third. A firepit had been dug, a grill placed over it, and flames were lapping at the bottom of a large pot of water set above it. Beside it, a white goblin was down on his knees gutting fish and hulling prawns.

  ‘Phineal’s still talking to them,’ said Cade.

  Celestia frowned, but then nodded.

  Phineal, along with a second crested webfoot goblin, was moving among the group, pausing to talk to each one in turn. At first, their crests would glow crimson, but as the conversation continued, the colours began to ripple with blues and greens, oranges and purples.

  ‘What do you think he’s saying to them?’ whispered Celestia.

  ‘He must be telling them about the clam. Their crest colours show excitement.’ Cade frowned. ‘But also caution – perhaps even fear.’ Then he added, ‘Have you noticed that some of them look different to Phineal?’

  ‘Of course they do, city boy,’ said Celestia. She sounded amused. ‘There are four different webfoot clans. One from each of the four lakes. Those there putting up the tent are red-rings,’ she said. ‘From the lake they call the Silent One.’

  Cade looked at the two squat webfoots. Bathed in the light from the moth lanterns, the red rings that encircled the skin of their arms, legs and neck looked black.

  ‘Those on the right are tusked webfoots from the lake called the Shimmerer,’ she said, pointing to three hefty-looking webfoots with stout yellow tusks that jutted upwards from their lower jaws. ‘And those are white webfoots. From the Lake of Cloud. They’re the muscle,’ she added and laughed.

  Cade looked at them. As the tallest and most powerfully built webfoots in the group they certainly looked the part. There were six of them, each with knives at their belts and arrow-sacks on their backs. Their lances and tridents had been thrust down into the ground next to where they were working.

  ‘And last but not least, the cresteds,’ said Celestia. ‘Their lake is called the Mirror of the Sky and is by all accounts the biggest and most beautiful of them all. It was home to the Great Blueshell Clam.’ She frowned. ‘I’m surprised there are only tw
o crested webfoots here.’

  ‘Yet they seem to be in charge,’ said Cade, as he watched Phineal and the other crested webfoot continuing to move from one goblin to the next.

  ‘According to my father, back in the olden days, it was always the crested webfoots who were the main clamtenders,’ said Celestia.

  Finally, the two crested webfoots seemed to have completed their tour. They withdrew from the others, moved off on their own and stood at the edge of the encampment, their heads lowered, deep in conversation. Cade watched them, feeling uneasy as their crests darkened by degrees to an ominous indigo.

  ‘Do you think something’s wrong?’ he wondered out loud.

  But then the crests resumed their crimson colour.

  ‘Let’s go and find out,’ said Celestia, setting off down the steps from the veranda, and this time Cade didn’t try to stop her.

  As they approached, Phineal looked up. He smiled, then nudged his companion with his elbow. The second crested webfoot looked Cade and Celestia up and down.

  ‘This is Firth Thewliph, my second in command,’ said Phineal. ‘Firth, this is Cade Quarter. And Celestia Hul . . . Hal . . .’

  ‘Helmstoft,’ said Celestia, putting the basket down next to Cade’s box and sack.

  ‘Cade has shown me great hospitality. And Celestia . . .’ Phineal’s crest glowed a deeper crimson. ‘She is an accomplished healer. The two of them are friends of the lake and forest,’ he said. ‘We can trust them both.’

  Celestia blushed and looked down at her feet, but Cade could tell she was delighted.

  Firth nodded and stuck out a hand, which the pair of them shook warmly.

  ‘You are very generous,’ said Phineal, looking down at the food and drink.

  ‘Use whatever you like,’ said Cade, and Firth took the provisions over to the webfoots on cooking duty at the firepit.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Celestia asked Phineal tentatively.

  He nodded. ‘Everything’s fine,’ he said, though the pulsing indigo that returned to his crest betrayed his words. He saw that Cade had noticed it too. ‘My friends had a spot of bother on the way here,’ he said quietly. ‘At a small lake to the west of the grey gorges. Ran into some Deepwoods traders who wanted to know where they were from and where they were heading. The whites had to discourage them.’

  ‘And did they?’ asked Cade.

  Phineal nodded his head. ‘Yes,’ he said, and glanced at Firth. ‘So far as we know.’

  The peppery smell of the lake moss that the gutted fish had been drenched in wafted over from the firepit as they were laid out on the grill. Cade turned to see that the pot was now bubbling and steaming. Despite the lateness of the hour, his stomach rumbled hungrily.

  The moon was high in the sky by the time the meal was declared ready. Eleven of the newly arrived webfoots gathered in a circle around the firepit, pulled wooden bowls and eating boards from their backpacks and sat cross-legged on their snailskin cloaks which were spread out on the ground. The twelfth – a stocky tusked webfoot by the name of Grylth – moved round the circle, serving the fish onto the eating boards and ladling thick barley porridge into the bowls.

  Cade was about to tuck in, when Phineal walked over to the two bobbing moth lanterns – trying his best not to limp – and reeled them both in. Flipping a catch and raising the side of first one, then the other lantern, he raised them into the air and shook them gently. The glowing moonmoths scrambled to the opening and took to the wing, flying up from the lanterns and fanning out into the air like droplets of molten metal.

  Phineal returned to the circle and sat down between Cade and Celestia. Then he looked around the ring of faces.

  ‘Welcome, brother clam-tenders,’ he said. ‘May our time at the Farrow Lake be peaceful.’ He turned to Cade, and then to Celestia, then back to the others. ‘And may the Great Blueshell Clam be safe in our care.’

  ‘Safe in our care!’ the chorus of voices went around, and the webfoots raised their water flasks.

  ‘If this is a toast, then we should use this,’ said Celestia, holding up the flagon. ‘The finest Farrow Lake winesap, brewed by Cade here himself.’

  The webfoots looked at the flagon, then at Phineal. His face was impassive. But then he nodded.

  ‘Just this once,’ he said. ‘To celebrate our wondrous find.’

  The flagon was passed around the circle and, one after the other, the webfoots – red-ringed, tusked, white and crested alike – raised it to their lips and took a swig, to the cheered accompaniment of the others. Then they started eating, all of them making balls of the barley and fish with their fingers and flicking them into their mouths, just as Cade had watched Phineal doing. And since they had no knives or spoons with them, he and Celestia did the same.

  ‘Those skycraft,’ said Cade, turning to Phineal and swallowing his mouthful. He nodded down towards the dozen small vessels hovering above the edge of the lake like beautiful, mysterious insects. ‘They look as if they come straight out of a history scroll.’

  Phineal smiled. ‘I thought I told you, Cade,’ he said, ‘we webfoots want nothing to do with the Third Age of Flight with its phraxengineers and their accursed technology.’

  Cade felt the tips of his ears burn as he pictured his father’s invention whirring away in the upper room of Thorne’s hive-hut.

  ‘Our skycraft do indeed belong to a different age. A time when life was simpler. Purer. The Second Age of Flight.’

  Cade nodded.

  ‘Why, the very first skycraft were constructed in your home city, Cade, at the Lake Landing Academy in the old Free Glades. That was more than five centuries ago, back when the settlement had only just been founded and the city of Great Glade was no more than a dream.’

  ‘These days, the Lake Landing Academy’s a museum,’ said Cade, feeling an unexpected lump in his throat as he remembered his old life.

  Phineal sighed. ‘Just as at the four lakes, all things change,’ he muttered, then smiled. ‘At the end of the First Age, when the flight rocks that had kept the ancient sky galleons airborne crumbled with stone-sickness, the creation of wooden skycraft was revolutionary. Back then, they could carry only a single rider, but they ensured that the tradition of sky travel would continue.’

  All around the circle, the webfoots nodded and murmured assent, their crests rippling with orange and purple. Phineal wasn’t just making his thoughts known to Cade, but to the entire gathering, as was the webfoot way.

  ‘Those first riders were not merchants, or pirates or leaguesmen as in the First Age. No, they were questers after knowledge—’

  ‘The librarian knights,’ one of the younger tusked webfoots interrupted.

  ‘Exactly so,’ said Phineal. ‘Librarian knights of the Lake Landing Academy charged with protecting and defending the Great Library—’

  ‘Just as we protect and defend the Great Blueshell Clam,’ a red-ringed webfoot chipped in.

  ‘Exactly so,’ said Phineal again, and Cade had the feeling that this was a story that had been told many times before, around many other campfires.

  ‘Each apprentice librarian knight selected his own lufwood log, from which he carved a flying creature – a creature they were commanded to create, not by their masters, but by their hearts. A ratbird. A stormhornet—’ ‘A snowbird,’ the white webfoot Cade had watched landing butted in, glancing back fondly over his shoulder at his own skycraft.

  ‘Exactly so,’ said Phineal, ‘for the vessels they created mirrored the spirit of their creators. Just as now.’ He paused. ‘But the carving of the skycraft and the learning of sail-setting and ropecraft was only half the story. For no skycraft, however buoyant its wood or wide its sails, can become truly flightworthy without the real miracle of the Second Age . . .’

  ‘Varnish!’ half a dozen voices called out in unison.

  ‘Varnish made from mole-glue and pine-oil, from wormdust and oak pepper. A varnish invented by the wisest and greatest of those old Deepwoods academics . . .
’

  ‘Tweezel!’ everyone shouted out at once.

  Phineal smiled. ‘Indeed. Tweezel the mighty spindle-bug. At more than two hundred and fifty years old, and nearing the end of his long life, yet still able to transform his world. Without Tweezel there would be no skycraft.’ He turned to Cade. ‘And no alternative to this Third Age of skytaverns, phraxengineers and . . .’

  Cade looked around. All the crests of the webfoots were glowing a dark and ominous purple.

  ‘Mire-pearlers.’

  · CHAPTER THIRTEEN ·

  AFTER THE FLAGON of winesap had been passed around the circle of webfoots several times, and finally drained, the red-rings and the tusked webfoots fetched musical instruments from their tents. Two reed pipes and a squeezebox. A pot-bellied drum. And a heart-shaped stringed instrument that was strung with fishgut and played with a bow. The night air filled with the sound of music.

  First there were reels and jigs that had the goblins tapping their great webbed feet and clapping their hands. At the urging of Phineal, Cade and Celestia joined in. Cade felt self-conscious at first. The complicated rhythms were difficult to follow, and he felt awkward and stiff. Celestia had no such inhibitions.

  She was entranced, clapping and swaying to the music, her movements lithe and vigorous. Her teeth gleamed in the moonlight as she laughed out loud, her eyes flashed with happiness and her black hair came undone and fell around her shoulders as she tossed her head.

  It was a whole new side to her that Cade was seeing, and he was captivated. Not only was she kind, clever and considerate, but she could also let herself go. He felt so proud to call her his friend.

  Phineal and Firth rose slowly to their feet, and the driving music softened into something gentler and full of longing. The two crested webfoots sang, their lilting voices harmonizing both with one another and with the slow, mournful music.

  Cade listened closely to the words.

  Phineal sang of the Great Blueshell Clam, the Ancient One whose dreams the webfoots had once shared, while Firth sang of the beauty of the Mirror of the Sky and the old world the webfoots had lost. The other webfoots listened attentively, their eyes glistening with tears and their crests glowing with muted colours.