New Lands (THE CHRONICLES OF EGG)
Read New Lands (THE CHRONICLES OF EGG) Online
Authors: Geoff Rodkey
NEW LANDS
ALSO BY GEOFF RODKEY
THE CHRONICLES OF EGG, BOOK ONE:
DEADWEATHER AND SUNRISE
NEW LANDS
GEOFF RODKEY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
AN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC.
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
An imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group.
Published by The Penguin Group.
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Copyright © 2013 by Geoff Rodkey. Illustrations copyright © 2013 by Iacopo Bruno.
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Published simultaneously in Canada.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rodkey, Geoff, 1970–
New lands / Geoff Rodkey. pages cm.—(The chronicles of Egg ; book 2)
Summary: Thirteen-year-old Eggbert and his friends face old and new enemies when they travel
to the New Lands in search of the lost Okalu tribe and its mysterious ancient treasures.
[1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Buried treasure—Fiction. 3. Good and evil—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.R61585Ne 2013 [Fic]—dc23 2012049196
ISBN: 978-1-101-60337-6
For Tal
I
hung my head over the side of the
Thrush
and watched the prow carve the seawater into a hissing spray. Viewed up close, the Blue Sea wasn’t all that blue, and I wondered—for the umpteenth time in the past few days—who had named it that, and why they hadn’t bothered to get it right.
They should have called it the Greenish Blue Sea. Or the Almost Blue Sea. Or the It Only Looks Blue From A Distance Sea.
It was stupid, I know. But it kept my mind off the other stuff.
Like the man who wanted to kill me.
And his daughter, Millicent, who I was in love with.
And the map in my head, which was the cause of all the trouble, and which I wasn’t even sure I was remembering right. Especially the tricky part in the middle.
Three squiggles down left, four dashes up…
Or was it four squiggles and three dashes?
It turns out it’s a bad idea to try and memorize something
written in a language you don’t even speak. I’d been practicing the map twenty times a day, tracing it with my finger on the deck of the
Thrush,
so you’d think by now I would’ve had it hammered into my head pretty good.
But it was getting harder, not easier.
Still hanging over the gunwale, I shut my eyes and tried to imagine the original, its crooked lines of Okalu hieroglyphs painted on the gloomy wall of the Fire King’s tomb.
Dash dot feather, cup, two dash dot firebird…
“Done yet?”
It was Guts. He was standing behind me on the deck.
“Almost,” I said. “Just let me throw up again.”
He snorted. “Wot’s yer problem? Food ain’t
that
bad.”
“It’s not the food,” I said, although the food was awful. The crew were all bone-skinny, and after three days of eating their smelly turtle meat and wormy biscuits, it was no mystery why.
“Seasick?”
“Not that, either.”
“Then wot?”
I’m scared out of my mind and I think we should just forget about finding this stupid treasure and run away.
But I couldn’t actually tell Guts that.
I couldn’t admit that I was terrified we were doomed—that if we set foot in the New Lands, we’d be killed long before we could find an Okalu Native to translate the map, and that the only sane thing to do was to bug out and flee down to the Barkers, or maybe even farther, someplace where nobody was gunning to kill me for an ancient treasure I barely understood and wasn’t even sure existed.
I couldn’t admit any of that.
Or could I?
I retched over the side one last time to make sure I was done. Then I straightened up and turned to face my partner.
Guts was bobbing on the balls of his feet, eyes twitching under his tangled thicket of white-blond hair. He raised his arms in a fighting stance. The steel hook on the stump of his left hand glistened in the morning sun.
“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s tussle!”
I sighed. “Again?”
“Need to practice!”
He’d bought the hook from a field pirate just before we left Deadweather Island. He was getting pretty handy at fighting with it, which I guess was helpful. Except that I was his only sparring partner, so the fact that he was getting better meant my shirt was ripped in three places, and there were a dozen puncture marks and several deep scratches on my forearms. He kept promising he wouldn’t make contact, but he couldn’t seem to help himself.
“Not now,” I said. “We need to talk.”
“’Bout wot?”
“I think we…it’s…I forgot the map.”
“Nah, ye didn’t.”
“I did!”
“Said that yesterday. Then ye remembered it.”
“I thought I did. Then I forgot again. And this time it’s worse.”
“Said
that
yesterday, too. C’mon, ye
porsamora
! Fight me!”
One of the crew had taught him how to swear in Cartager. He was as excited about that as he was about his new hook.
“C’mon! Lucy needs a workout!”
He’d named the hook “Lucy.” I kept telling him it was ridiculous, but he didn’t care.
“I’m serious! We need to talk!” I insisted.
Guts lowered his arms and frowned. His eyes twitched one more time and then went still. When we first met—when Ripper Jones and his pirate crew had made us fight almost to the death, and had done who knows what else to Guts before that—he twitched constantly. Eyes, shoulders, head…sometimes the whole upper half of his body would shudder.
Now it was mostly just his eyes, and sometimes he’d go a good two minutes without a twitch.
Sometimes, he almost seemed normal.
Not me. Not lately. I was a wreck. And the closer we got to Pella Nonna, the worse I got.
I’m scared out of my mind and I think we should just run away.
Guts was still staring at me.
“So talk,” he said.
I took another deep breath.
