The Eye of the North by Sinead O'Hart

Author:Sinead O'Hart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2017-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

Emmeline’s face tingled as the cold touched it. Wrapped up tight in her stolen coat, borrowed boots, and loaned mittens, she kept putting one foot in front of the other. The straps of her snowshoes were too loose, but she did the best she could with them and tried to force herself to believe she was making good progress. The truth was, she had no idea where she was going. She’d long ago left Igimaq’s tiny village behind, and now she was creeping around a rocky shoreline, the sea gushing and hissing to her left. Low on the horizon a pale sun burned, and there was enough light to see for hundreds of yards in every direction. The ground was barren. All that met Emmeline’s gaze was a landscape so vast, and so flat, and so unknown, that it made her bones rattle.

Walk with a cocky step and your head held high, she told herself, Thing’s jaunty voice playing in her mind, and you can do anything.

“Right,” she muttered, swallowing hard.

As she walked, she dredged her memory again, and the book her father used to like to read to her floated to the surface. She could hardly believe she’d forgotten it, as reading with her father hadn’t exactly been a regular occurrence, but then the cover burst clearly into her mind and the old fear she’d had of it washed over her. She shuddered as it filled her head—a drawing of a giant mammoth, its tusks huge and yellowed and its eyes red with rage, set above the words Legendary Exploits! in a garish font. It had been a collection of stories, each one gorier than the next, and she remembered her father’s voice as he read, dark and booming at the gruesome bits and spookily whispery for the rest. She’d never let him know how much it had scared her. One story had definitely been about the Kraken, she felt surer with every moment, and she struggled to recall it in detail. As her mind orbited around thoughts of terrifying beasts that couldn’t be killed, like a small moon around a planet, she began to wish she hadn’t been such a scaredy-cat.

But they were just stories—weren’t they? She wrapped her mittened hands around her coil of rope and her coil of fishing line. Or were Mum and Dad trying to tell me…trying to show me something…But her thoughts halted there, as if they had nowhere else to go.

Every step she took felt like she was walking farther and farther down into a dark tunnel with no light at the other end, but Emmeline’s feet didn’t slow.

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