Aqua Jewel

Chapter 6 - The Mirror

"Something strange is definitely happening," said Haras.

Lae nodded without taking her eyes off the fire. "It always leads back to the necklaces," she said.

"Well not everything," said Rennoc. "What about lord Dennek?" He raised his eyebrows.

"Dennek's beside the point right now," said Lae. "We're talking about something entirely different."

"Oh, so there's nothing strange about an evil lord turning kids into ghost-like forms that no one, apart from us, can see?" Rennoc added, sarcastically. Alyk shifted uncomfortably at the word "us".

Lae finally took her eyes off the fire to glare at Rennoc. "You know what I meant," she said coldly.

Rennoc crossed his arms and focused on the tree to his left. "I have no idea," he said, though obviously just to annoy her. Lae narrowed her eyes. She opened her mouth to say something – probably bad – and I braced myself for the upcoming fight.

"Stop!" yelled Nika. I made a silent note to thank her later. "Do you realize how ridiculous this is? Arguing over something so small right now? We have to work together if we want to survive the next few days! We have to get back to Mencia to tell King Trub about Lord Dennek." Her squirrel friend seemed to agree with her. He scampered up on top of her head and made some angry squirrel noises. They sounded like squeaky barks. "Tweep thinks so too," said Nika, with no hint of humour in her voice.

"Tweep?"

"That's his name."

"Why did you name him Tweep?"

"I didn't name him. He told me his name."

We got to Mencia in the late afternoon the next day. We heard the noise before we saw it; people yelling, animals mooing, oinking, clucking, neighing and bleating, something big crashing into something else ...

We'd ended up at the edge of Leapton, more commonly known as Mencia's main village, which was its biggest and most crowded – not to mention its loudest, if you haven't already noticed – but that was good. King Trub's castle was located in the center of the village.

There was a long line of huge bushes separating the forest from the farm next to it. Quietly, so as not to alert anyone who might be hanging around on the other side, we crept up to the bushes and attempted to peer through them. But they were so thick that we couldn't see a thing on the other side – much less get through to the other side.

"Now what do we do?" said Rennoc, verbalising what was on all of our minds. No one answered. We couldn't just keep walking along the hedge until we reached the end because it went on for so long that my eyes couldn't see where it ended. It would probably take another day to get inside Mencia.

Then Lae approached the bushes. She put her hand up, and hesitated. I wondered if she would try to climb over. She placed her hand on the plant delicately, and the twigs in that area curled back so that there was a small hole, a few inches wide. I gasped. We'd seen some pretty weird stuff so far, but this was new.

Lae brushed her hand over the bush in an arch shape. The branches inside the arch twisted and curled outwards, creating the figure Lae had drawn. In no more than thirty seconds, I was staring at a doorway made through the bush into Mencia. It looked like a scene straight out of a fairy tale. It was only after the branches had stopped moving that Lae turned around. It was then that her green necklace's glow faded.

"Wow," said Alyk softly.

"Thanks," said Haras. Lae smiled at him, and his face brightened considerably in return.