Eight Days of Luke by Diana Wynne Jones

Author:Diana Wynne Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

12

THE SISTERS

Aunt Dot and Cousin Ronald had gone out, which David thought was a stroke of good fortune. Luke seemed utterly exhausted and not in a fit state to meet anyone. Astrid told David to get out deck chairs for them while she wrung some lemonade and biscuits out of Mrs. Thirsk. The three of them sat on the lawn, which was shining and wet in the sun. A rainbow was arched across the remaining clouds, staining a distant clump of trees.

Astrid astonished David by not demanding any explanation. All she said was: “It’s too bad of them to expect a kid like you to find you don’t know what in two days and a half!” David thought that put his impossible bargain in a nutshell. “If it wasn’t for Luke,” said Astrid, “I’d have stopped you offering. The worst of it is, I think I know what you’re looking—”

Luke raised his white face. “Well, don’t tell him,” he said. “Please.”

“Not I,” said Astrid. “I shall keep biting my tongue. But when I think—”

“Talk about something else,” said Luke. “You’re going to let it out. I can see it coming.”

Astrid laughed. “How well you know me, Luke!” She changed the subject and began to talk about the lump of meat on the drive yesterday. Luke, after a wary look at her, slumped down in his deck chair again and seemed to David to be recovering. He felt nearly as jaded as Luke himself. He could not even think where to start looking, and he was supposed to have found it by Sunday night. “And the way those birds were dragging it about!” said Astrid.

David could not help thinking she could have chosen a more tactful subject. He was pulling himself together to explain that he had had to feed the mutton to the ravens, when something black beat the air beside his ear and he felt a sudden weight on his shoulder. Very startled, he ducked away sideways. The raven, perhaps to keep its balance, or maybe as an affectionate gesture, seized David’s ear in its beak. It pinched nearly as hard as Cousin Ronald.

“What do you want?” David said, half laughing and half annoyed.

The raven let go of his ear in order to speak. “Have you any more meat?” it said.

David was struck by a sudden splendid idea. “Quick!” he said excitedly. “Has either of you anything it can eat?”

They looked a little stunned. Then Astrid picked up her handbag. “Yes. Wait a minute.” She scrabbled through the seventy useless objects, and the seventy-first was a packet of cheese-biscuits. David tore it open and fed the biscuits one by one into the raven’s ready beak.

“There,” he said at last. “That’s all. Now can you do me a favor?”

The bird was leaning out from David’s shoulder in order to see his face. “Of course,” it said and, no doubt as a gesture of gratitude, tried to take David’s nose in its beak.

David clapped his hand over his nose in the nick of time.

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