Into the Mist (Land of Elyon #4)
Patrick Carman
For Christopher Carman, my Thomas
And with special thanks to Craig Walker and David Levithan, who let me wander far and wide
Finding them with open arms on my return is what made this book possible.
My plans require time and distance.
MARCUS WHITMAN
AUTHOR INTRODUCTION
I have two hopes as I begin telling the tale of Into the Mist. The first is that many existing readers have come along for a glimpse into the storied past of two beloved characters: Thomas and Roland Warvold. The second is that Into the Mist will introduce new readers to the adventures and mysteries to be had in The Land of Elyon. If you are fulfilling my first hope, then I'm afraid this introduction may be of little use to you -- unless of course you've forgotten some or all of what you've already read, in which case I encourage you to read on!
If, on the other hand, you are a reader who is new to The Land of Elyon, this introduction is a perfectly reasonable place to begin.
The first three books in The Land of Elyon series -- The Dark Hills Divide, Beyond the Valley of Thorns, and The Tenth City -- form a trilogy, chronicling the adventures of a young girl, Alexa Daley, in and around the walled cities of Bridewell Common. When Alexa is able to overcome the walls that surround her, she travels far and wide and discovers a land caught
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between the forces of good and evil. Into the Mist begins shortly after The Tenth City, but most of it takes place a generation before Alexa was even born. This was a time when the land was more magical and unstable.
The Land of Elyon is an island with towering cliffs on all sides, and it is here that nearly our entire story occurs. Indeed, the main story of Into the Mist takes place within The Land of Elyon, though it begins somewhere else: on the Lonely Sea. At the end of the Elyon trilogy Alexa has left The Land of Elyon on the Warwick Beacon, a boat captained by the narrator of Into the Mist, Roland Warvold. She has left her home in search of a new adventure, one that she doesn't understand, and it is Into the Mist that provides the answer she seeks.
Certain characters and places are introduced in the Elyon trilogy which would be useful for you to be aware of before beginning Into the Mist. I offer them as a point of reference, should you become confused at some point in the story. There are dozens of other important characters and places in the lore of Elyon that are not included here, but in truth you need not be concerned with these other details in order to find yourself on a firm footing at the beginning of Into the Mist.
Into the Mist will lead you through The Land of Elyon at a time when people were less common in wild places and thus magic roamed more freely. People bring an end to magic, while trees and streams and mountains
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and animals -- left to their own devices -- live and breathe magic.
Remember this as we begin our journey!
-- Patrick Carman
Walla Walla, WA
Characters and places from previous books that intersect with the story of INTO THE MIST
Alexa Daley -- The heroine and main character of the Elyon trilogy. At the beginning of Into the Mist, she is on the Lonely Sea with her ever-present companion Yipes and the captain of the Warwick Beacon, Roland Warvold.
Thomas and Roland Warvold --
Adventurous brothers, one by land, one by sea -- whose surprising pasts are revealed in Into the Mist. Thomas Warvold plays a secret role in Alexa's life, revealed in The Tenth City. He has also traveled far and wide in The Land of Elyon. Roland Warvold , captain of the Warwick Beacon, has spent nearly his entire life at sea. He tells the story of Into the Mist.
Yipes -- A tiny man who once lived on Mount Norwood. Has been in nearly all of Alexa's adventures and continues to be her closest companion.
Castalians -- The people who live at the foot of Mount Lay then and are subject to a line of evil rulers. Alexa plays a key role in the rebellion of Castalia and the fight against the tenth of these rulers, known as Grindalls.
Abaddon -- The evil force in opposition to Elyon. Elyon is the spiritual force of good in the story, Abaddon the source of all evil.
Grindall -- A corrupt ancestry of men possessed by Abaddon to do evil in The Land of Elyon.
Ander -- The ruler of the forest in Alexa's time, a grizzly bear. We meet his ancestor, the Forest King, in Into the Mist.
The Valley of Thorns -- A dangerous line of defense erected by Victor Grindall's ogres; this vast swath of sharp, poisonous shafts protects Castalia from intruders.
Armon -- The last of the race of giants, onetime keeper of the stones, and friend to Thomas Warvold, Roland Warvold, and Alexa Daley.
NOTE:
ALEXA'S CHAPTERS START LIKE THIS.
Roland's chapters start like this.
PART I
The House on the Hìll
One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
--André Gide
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***
CHAPTER 1
A NOD AND A WINK
There was a chill in the air when I came out from below and onto the deck of the Warwick Beacon. I stood at the mast alone for a long time and watched soft white mist swirl on the surface of the water. It's easy to lose track of time on a long voyage, so it's hard to say how long I stood there before hearing the sound of footsteps approaching on the old wooden deck.
"You look well this morning, Alexa."
It was Roland, arriving from the bridge to bring me my morning cup of tea. He was always up first -- before Yipes or I could imagine raising so much as an eyebrow -- and there was always hot tea to be had from the captain of the Warwick Beacon. It was one of his very few but frequent indulgences. The tea steamed in the morning light, and we stood at the rail, no land in sight, the sails catching a lazy breeze. The cup was warm in my hand, a comfort against the cold beginning of a new day on the Lonely Sea.
"Where are we going ...and when will we get there?"
I had asked both of these questions many times before, and I'd always received a nod and a wink but no answer. It had become our morning routine. Roland had long seemed
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unable or unwilling to share the answers with me, and in this way the day seemed to begin like all the others. Only there was something different this time.
The questions I'd asked hung in the air. He didn't nod or wink or speak, and this made me wonder if the time had come for him to tell me where we were going and when we would arrive.
"We've been out here a long while, haven't we, Alexa?" he began.
"We have," I answered.
"And every morning you ask me the same two questions and get the same response."
I nodded and winked, bringing a smile to my old friend's face.
"I'm all out of nods and winks," said Roland, sipping at his tea. "When Yipes awakens, come find me at the wheel. I'll tell you where we're going. Though you should be warned -- it's not a quick or simple thing to share. It will take some time to tell the whole truth."
I handed my teacup back to Roland and raced across the deck to the door leading below. As soon as I threw it open, I began yelling for Yipes and bounding down the steps in search of his tiny hammock. The light from the open door poured into the darkened cabin, but Yipes didn't notice. This didn't surprise me -- I had long been certain that if we found ourselves under attack by a loud and angry monster, Yipes would sleep through the entire affair.
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"Yipes! Wake up! Roland is going to tell us where we're going!"
The belowdecks cabin wasn't very big. There was a small kitchen, a bathroom, and a place to sleep with three hammocks. The three hammocks hung in a row with
Roland's first, then mine, then the little one Yipes slept in. It was a good arrangement, since this was the order in which we usually arose in the morning, and it was darkest in the very corner of the room where Yipes hung still and quiet. I yelled the news once more but he didn't move. I hated waking him this way, but we'd been at sea for twenty-five long days with nothing more than twenty-five nods and twenty-five winks. Now there was news to be had, and I was sure he'd want me to wake him for it. I nudged his hammock and let it swing back and forth. Getting no response, I grabbed hold of Yipes's mustache on one side and began to pull. I pulled until his lip was hanging in the air. Then I wiggled his lip all around, but still he wouldn't stir.
I took hold of the hammock from the bottom and flipped it over, dropping Yipes onto the floor of the Warwick Beacon with a loud thud. For a moment there was nothing, only the sound of his squashed nose breathing against the wood floor.
"Is that you, Alexa?" came his muffled little voice.
"Yes, it's me! Wake up!"
Yipes slowly sat up, dazed and only half awake.
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"How did I find my way to the floor?" He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and twitched his nose. "I was having the strangest dream. It was those two cats from the library -- do you remember those wicked cats? They were pulling on my mustache with their sharp teeth. It was awful!"
I wasn't about to tell him who'd really been pulling on his mustache. "Yipes -- listen to me," I said.
He was drifting off to sleep again, trying to lie down on the floor, but I took him by the shoulders and shook him fully awake. It struck me once more what a little man he was -- like a small child of seven or eight who wished he were bigger. Maybe that was why Yipes was so fond of his mustache, for a mustache was the kind of thing that took all the child right out of a person.
"I asked him where we were going and there was no nod and no wink," I explained.
Yipes shook his head vigorously, rubbed his hands over his face, and looked sternly into my eyes. "No nod and no wink? You're sure of it?"
"I'm sure," I replied.
Yipes jumped to his feet without warning and tangled his head in the hammock. He brushed the hammock away like thick cobwebs until he was free, then together we raced from the cabin into the light of day. The two of us went straight to the bridge in search of Roland and found him standing at the wheel, a cup of tea in one hand and a small nautical journal in the other.
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We stood before him and waited.
"Hold that, won't you, dear?" Roland held his teacup out to me and I took it from him. "I set your cup over by the stove, in case you should want it."
There was a small wooden door at the center of the wheel that he now opened. It was a part of the wheel that did not turn, and when he opened the door it flopped halfway down and made a flat surface of a size that might accommodate a group of mice having a dinner party. He pulled out an inkwell that had been hidden in the wheel and removed the lid, then took a very old pen from his pocket and tapped the tip twice on his tongue. He inked the pen in the well and began writing carefully in the little book, blowing on the paper now and then to dry his words to the page.
"Tea," he said, and I handed back his cup, which he held along with the pen. He took a drink, then held the cup out once more for me to take. He went back to his writing, occasionally looking out to sea and turning the wheel ever so slightly in one direction or the other.
Yipes poked one of his sharp little elbows into my side, trying to get me to say something, and some of the tea wobbled over the edge of the cup.
"Something on your mind, Yipes?" asked Roland.
"Me? No, not me, sir. I'm only just waking up."
Roland went back to his writing, and I began to wonder if I'd only imagined our earlier encounter. He wasn't a man to be rushed about things, and he practically lived to
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get the better of Yipes. Trying to find ways with which to make Yipes do silly things seemed to bring endless joy to Roland, our quiet man of the sea. I waited patiently and hoped Roland hadn't changed his mind about answering my questions. He reached his hand out toward me without looking, and I held the cup where he could take hold of it again. He sipped absently, looking out over the sea then back at his notes in the journal before him.
"My tea is cold," he said. Then, looking at my small companion, he added, "Fetch me another cup from the kettle, won't you, Yipes?" Roland took three steps to the very top of the stern and emptied the cold tea over the edge of the boat. "Maybe you could fetch three cups -- one for each of us -- and when you come back I'll be finished with these notes I'm taking. Maybe then we could have a nice long chat in the chill of the morning."
Yipes beamed and hopped up, taking the cup from Roland and running for the middle of the ship. There was a teapot on a stove set before the entrance to the cabin. The tea was piping hot, and two more cups sat waiting to be filled. I watched from the bridge as Yipes set Roland's cup next to the others and filled all three to the very rim, a terrible habit Yipes could not break and always paid dearly for. As soon as Yipes had all three cups balanced against one another and held firm between his tiny hands as best he could, he began the perilous and slow journey back to the bridge, humming nervously to himself the
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whole way. Roland smiled as he spun the wheel hard to the right and the wind caught with a snap in the sails overhead. The Warwick Beacon pitched into the wind, and Yipes howled as the hot tea spilled over the edges of the three cups.
"He'll never learn," said Roland, turning the wheel back to where it had been.
When Yipes arrived, he was very happy with his effort and didn't seem to mind at all that he'd spilled some of the tea on his hands. He set the cups on the worn wood of the deck and stood straight up.
"Mighty hot tea this morning," he said with a smile. "Mighty hot!"
"It would be best with a bit of morning bread, don't you think?" asked Roland. I took my cup of hot tea in hand and waited while Yipes darted back to the cabin for one of the loaves we'd cooked up the night before. To be fair, I loved to watch Yipes go zinging from place to place on the Warwick Beacon. He was very fond of climbing the high masts that held the sails as though they were trees from the forest back home. He would zip from the stern to the bow in the most precarious ways imaginable, never taking the obvious route, and always providing entertainment for both me and Roland.
Roland now smiled at me knowingly, shook the ink from his pen, and began to put his writing things away. By the time Yipes returned with the bread, the little wooden
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door was shut on the inkwell, the journal and the pen had been pocketed away, and our captain stood silently at the wheel of the Warwick Beacon, wisps of gray hair catching on the morning wind.
"Another day, maybe two, and you'll see land once more," he announced.
The answer to my first question had finally come. Twenty-five days on the Lonely Sea would soon come to an end.
Now I repeated my second question. "Where are you taking us, Roland?" I asked. I feared the wink and the nod, that he had changed his mind and would not tell us as we sat holding our warm cups and nibbling at the bread. But I was wrong to fear old Roland would clam up once more, for at last he was ready to take us on an adventure that would last through the day and into the night.
"I have thought a great deal about how to tell you," he began. "It must come in the form of a story -- one that finds its beginning when I was near your age. I will tell it just as I remember it, as it happened to my brother and me when we were boys of only ten and eleven."
He looked my way, then off into the sky, as though he were trying to actually see his long-forgotten childhood.
"I do love a good story!" said Yipes, tearing a piece of bread off the loaf with his mouth and wiping the crumbs from his mustache. I held the cup of warm tea close and settled in for a perfect day at sea with my closest friend
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seated next to me, our shoulders
touching to keep warm, and a good long story about to be told.
Roland looked directly into my eyes and moved the wheel ever so slightly.
"We begin with two angry dogs, the boy who owned them, and my brother."
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***
CHAPTER 2
Madame Vickers's House on the Hill
"Get back from there!" The dreadful voice echoing down the stairs into the basement where I slept was familiar. It belonged to a boy named Finch, the son of Madame Vickers, the woman who ran the House on the Hill. As I lay on the dirt floor, I felt a bug crawling along my foot and flicked it away, thinking (as I often did on waking) of the awful situation in which I found myself.
The House on the Hill was the kind of place one might wish on their worst enemy, full of terrible jobs to be done, bad food to be eaten, and regular beatings to be had. I lived there with my brother Thomas because we'd been thrown out of the boys' home in Ainsworth for pulling a wild prank. (A box full of spiders, two snakes, and the headmaster's sleeping wife were all involved.) For years we'd gotten away with such behavior because we'd never been caught, but Thomas had brawled with an older boy and won the day before, and older boys turn to snitching when their status is threatened by someone a year or two beneath them. We were implicated in a series of other similar behaviors and the headmaster's wife -- a
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woman with a near fatal fear of snakes and spiders -insisted my brother and I be gotten rid of.
And so it was that Thomas and I came to Madame Vickers's House on the Hill at the ripe old ages of ten and eleven -- myself being ten and Thomas being eleven. The House on the Hill was reserved primarily for children younger than us, children between the ages of six and nine who could be (according to Madame Vickers) "molded into useful laborers." By the time they turned ten they'd be moved off elsewhere to do even more work. Since Thomas and I were the oldest, we were leaders of a band of misfit boys and girls several years our junior, and we prided ourselves on taking care of them as best we could, given the grim conditions.