Juniper Harvey and the Vanishing Kingdom by Nina Varela

Author:Nina Varela [VARELA, NINA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2023-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

16

The swamp is smelly, both in the sense of being stinky and in the sense of just plain having a lot of smells: hot river water, mud and mildew, rotten eggs, and the almost-sweet scent of decaying leaves. At first the water is only a couple of inches high, but as we venture farther into the shadows of the cypress trees, it gets deeper and deeper. Mud sucks at our boots with every step. I kind of thought swamps were supposed to look like big mud puddles, but this one looks like a flooded forest.

Sam’s in the lead with her phone GPS. “I have so many questions, I don’t know where to begin,” she says, splashing purposefully through the muck. “About magic, about this other world, about the crown—like, how does the crown work? I know it’s magic, but how does that magic function? Galatea came here, to Earth, to Florida, from another planet or a parallel universe or something, and that means she had to cross the universe—she crossed the universe—to get here, but how? Did she come through a wormhole?”

“A what?” says Galatea.

“A wormhole. It’s like… Here.” She stops to fish the map of Cypress out of her pocket, unfolding it to show us. “Ignore the map. Just pretend this piece of paper is the universe. These two points”—she indicates the north and south dots—“are far away from each other, right? So, let’s say you’re trying to get from one point to the other. You’d think the easiest way would be to travel in a straight line.” She traces a fingertip along the red line she drew earlier, connecting the dots. “But what if there was a shortcut?” She bends the paper so the two points are touching. “That’s a wormhole. Maybe Galatea came through one, which—well, it could mean our worlds are connected somehow. I mean, why here, you know? Why now?”

“I hear something,” Galatea says suddenly. “Get behind me.”

She draws her sword. We duck behind her, scanning the trees for any sign of movement, braced for an attack. “Oneiroi?” I ask in a whisper.

“Not sure.”

Ollie raises his chewed-up baseball bat.

We hear wingbeats. A moment later, the air is a riot of flapping wings and feathers as hundreds of birds pour out of the sky to settle in the branches above us. They don’t resemble giant black-winged oneiroi, but they’re definitely not your average flock. No two birds are the same kind. I spot sparrows and starlings, woodpeckers, owls, sharp-eyed hawks and bright little songbirds, all sharing the same branches with complete disregard for the food chain. Ducks and geese land in the water with a series of splashes; then the big, old wetland kings arrive one by one: white crane, egret, heron, their wingspans nearly clipping the trees. All the birds settle and go still, just… watching us.

“Okay, whose nightmare is this?” Ollie asks.

The four of us exchange blank looks. “Maybe they’re not oneiroi,” says Galatea. “Maybe this is more like the forest in the Old Barn—a living dream.

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