Chapter One
Vivienne Small lived in a tree house. It was quite new, her previous tree house having been destroyed by pirates, as some of you may remember. The new house had beautiful canvas awnings and a deep veranda. Through the veranda’s carved railings, Vivienne had trained a length of pikwan vine.
A pikwan is something like a mango crossed with a horse chestnut, and one morning as the forest came to life in shimmering shades of green, Vivienne plucked a ripe one from the vine. She split open the hard, spiky shell with her pocketknife, but before she had even managed one bite of the sweet flesh on the inside, she heard a ferocious cracking, rushing, breaking noise from above. She dropped the pikwan in alarm, and its two halves rolled off the veranda, falling a very, very long way to the ground.
Vivienne looked up to see a huge brown blur hurtling toward her through the forest’s canopy. She flared her wings and made a desperate flying lunge to get clear of it. She wrapped her arms around a branch and hung on tightly as whatever it was crashed into one side of her tree house, taking with it her canvas awnings, a large part of the veranda, the kitchen wall, and a dresser full of crockery and cutlery. Vivienne was left clinging to the branch, her feet dangling above the ruins of her house, as a thunderous noise rose up from the forest floor. She watched in dismay as her remaining furniture, books, and ornaments vibrated with the impact, then settled untidily back to their respective places in the ravaged tree house.
Vivienne fluttered down on outspread wings to land on what was left of her veranda. Above her, where there should have been branches of all sizes and leaves of infinite shades of green, with only tiny pinpricks of sunshine and sky peeping through, there was a huge hole, and Vivienne found herself staring up into a pinkish dawn. Far, far below her, in the deep gloom of the forest, she could just make out the shape of the thing that had caused all this damage. For the briefest of moments, she allowed herself to feel heartbroken and cross about the devastation of her beautiful new home. Then her thoughts turned to questions.
What on earth was that thing? And had it really been furry?
Gliding down branch by branch through the layers of the forest to its floor, Vivienne landed deftly beside what was, indeed, an animal. It was a dog, but not like most of us are used to. This was a gigantic dog, bigger than any you have ever seen. Also, it had wings.
Once, and not all that long ago, Winged Dogs had been a common sight in the skies above the Peppermint Forest. Vivienne remembered the days when dogs such as these had lived in packs in the Winged Mountains, making dens in the highest of the mountain caves, flying above towering waterfalls, and fledging their pups from craggy outcrops. Vivienne had loved to watch the parent dogs hover as their little ones practiced the use of their wings. Sometimes the puppies would fall into the lakes below and face a long dog paddle back to shore. Then they would shake themselves off, and their parents would urge them up into the sky to try again.
Those days were gone: the Winged Dogs had vanished. Not one by one, as is so often the case when rare creatures leave the world, but all at once, and quite mysteriously. Vivienne had heard it said—though she didn’t know whether or not it was true—that all of the Winged Dogs had flown right out of her world and into another.
And yet, here was a Winged Dog, its fur glowing in the bright shaft of light that shone into the deep green of the forest. Its head had come to rest between two giant tree trunks. Its body crushed an entire stand of enormous ferns. One of the dog’s wings was wedged in a myrtle tree, while the other was pinned awkwardly beneath its body. All around and underneath the creature were shreds of canvas and shards of railings and floorboards. Vivienne also saw two of her chairs (now broken) and several plates and cups.
The dog’s breathing was slow and shallow. Blood dripped from one of its nostrils, and its tongue lolled—huge and pink and wet—on the ground. Making soft crooning noises, Vivienne reached out and stroked the dog’s face. Carefully, she pulled back one of the dog’s eyelids. The pupil did not contract. As she inspected the length of the animal’s huge body, she found what appeared to be claw marks on its underbelly. There were deep wounds on the dog’s sides, too, and bloodstains on its thick pelt.
A white crescent moon marked the fur between the dog’s huge eyes. And when Vivienne checked more closely, she saw by the narrowness of the muzzle that this was a female, and quite an old girl, judging by the silvering around her eyes. If only Vivienne knew the dog’s name, she might be able to call her back to consciousness.
“Moonthread?” she guessed. “Moonborn? Crescent Moon? White Moon?”
The dog did not stir. Her breathing was slowing still further. Vivienne thought more widely.
“Windseeker? Weathereye? Stormwing?” Vivienne said, but the dog lay silent and unmoving. Vivienne’s brow furrowed. “What kind of creature has done this to you?”
Vivienne knew of beasts that were large and beasts that were vicious, but she knew of no creature that was both large and vicious enough to inflict such terrible wounds on a Winged Dog. Even if two Winged Dogs were to clash, which was unheard of, their claws were not sharp enough to make the awful gashes this dog had suffered.
Vivienne studied the place, high above, where the falling dog had torn a hole in the forest’s leafy ceiling. She shuddered as if a cold breeze had suddenly blown, although none had. What was out there? She had to know.
With the ease and speed of someone who has flown through forests her whole life, Vivienne spread her small, blue, leathery wings and made a series of flying leaps up, up, up, past her broken tree house and into the tree’s very highest branches. From where she stood, sharing her weight between two leafy limbs, she saw two salt eagles flying north and a flock of derry birds down on the shore. Wrens and swallows darted about. Otherwise, the sky was empty. Whatever creature had savaged the Winged Dog and caused it to fall was no longer in sight.
Vivienne sighed and felt troubled. In the distance, the morning sea was the color of the inside of an oyster shell. To the east, a bright sun was climbing into the day. Beams of light threaded in and out of long slender clouds. Vivienne also spied the wide mouth of the River of Rythwyck emerging from the depths of the Peppermint Forest. To the south, as she twisted around, she saw the snowcapped ridgeline of the Mountains of Margolov, bright against the horizon. But no, she didn’t. Vivienne rubbed her eyes. Although she could see the slopes of the Mountains of Margolov, she could not see their jagged peaks. The mountains had … grown.
“Not possible,” Vivienne murmured to herself.
Was this a trick of the light? Vivienne blinked several times and looked again. Still the mountains blocked out the entire southern sky. And with a shiver that went all the way out to the tips of her wings, she saw that at their very tops, the mountains seemed to pierce the firmament itself. The sky puckered and folded around the shoulders of the mountains as if they were outgrowing the world itself.
Vivienne’s adventures had taken her high into the Mountains of Margolov on several occasions, through foothills tangled with lush jungle, and into the upper reaches where the trees and plants grew stunted and sideways in the constant wind. She had ventured up past the snow line, where the air thinned and nothing green grew, and she remembered how it felt to stand at the top of the very highest peak and see the entire world stretched out at her feet. The Mountains of Margolov that Vivienne knew were immense. So how had they become larger still?
Vivienne’s heart raced. She realized she was experiencing a very rare thing: she was afraid.
Text copyright © 2015 by Heather Rose and Danielle Wood
Illustrations copyright © 2016 by Stevie Lewis