Sisters of the Lost Marsh by Lucy Strange

Author:Lucy Strange
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

I am watching the moon rise from my window: an almost-full shape in the starless sky. I am sitting on a chair for the first time since I collapsed in the kitchen downstairs. I am sick of lying down; my twitching limbs feel restless. I nibble the corner of a bread roll Sarah left for me, and sip a beaker of milk. “Eat as much as you can manage,” she said, but my appetite has still not come back. My tum feels empty but weak; it does not want to be bothered with proper food yet.

I rummage through my bundle, looking for Tales of the Marshes. Something else flies out with it, clinking onto the floor. I pick it up. My heart gives a happy, hefty thump. It is a brooch—Mammer’s brooch—a shining black stone set in silverwork. I remember when the triplets first unearthed it from a box of treasures under Grammy’s bed. “Look!” Dolly cried, holding it up for us all to see. “It’s a omlet!”

“You mean amulet,” Freya laughed. “You mean a lucky thing they have in fairy tales to keep them safe.”

“I do mean exactly that,” Dolly said. “A omlet.”

“Omelettes are made of eggs, you daft duck,” Grace said, ruffling her little sister’s curls.

“It’s a magical omlet,” said Darcy. “Look! You can see the magic in it. All shiny …”

It stuck like goosegrass: From that day, Mammer’s brooch had always been our magical omlet. And it had been on many a daring quest with the triplets. It had even smashed a perfect round hole in the kitchen window during one particularly fierce battle between an elf and two frightful trolls.

I smile, gripping the brooch in my hand. I know how much it means to the triplets. It was kind of them to give it to me for this quest of my own.

The road outside is quiet. A tawny owl keewiks a few times, and there is an answering hoo-hooo from the horse chestnut trees beyond the orchard. I smile, thinking of my chestnut trees at the top of Glorious Hill. Then I press my face to the gauze and squint at the tiny lights of the Full Moon Fayre over at Gallows End. I listen for the distant wisps of music, but instead I hear sounds coming from the other direction.

Voices, and the clip-clop of horses’ hooves.

It’s awful late for folk to be out riding …

“There’s an inn at the bottom of this hill,” says a man’s voice. “The Gate. We’ll stop there for supper. If the moon’s bright enough, we’ll keep on for Gallows End tonight. Awright?”

“Ar,” comes the weary reply. And a cold shudder goes right through me.

Dadder? It can’t be! Has the fever returned? Am I mad? Perhaps this is just another nightmare and I am still asleep …

But then I can see them—two men on horseback—and even from this distance, even through the gauze and the dull haze of moonlight, I know it is Dadder and Silas Kirby. I shrink back a little, though I know they cannot see me up here in the darkness.

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