Knock Three Times Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Cressida Cowell

  Cover art copyright © 2019 by Brandon Dorman. Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

  Visit us at LBYR.com

  Originally published in 2019 by Hodder Children’s Books in Great Britain

  First U.S. Edition: October 2019

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019947553

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-50842-1 (hardcover), 978-0-316-50840-7 (ebook), 978-0-316-49527-1 (int’l)

  E3-20190917-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  Note by Cressida Cowell Lost-Language Expert

  Prologue

  Part One: Forest on Fire

  Chapter 1. Betrayal

  Chapter 2. The Trees Are Screaming

  Chapter 3. Queen Sychorax Is Not a Huggy Sort of Mother

  Chapter 4. Exit, Rescued By a Bear

  Chapter 5. The Tunnel of Fire

  Chapter 6. In the Lair of the Bear

  Chapter 7. Are They in the Learning Place for Spectacularly Gifted Wizards or Are They NOT?

  Chapter 8. The Nuckalavee

  Part Two: Refuge

  Chapter 9. The Learning Place for Spectacularly Gifted Wizards

  Chapter 10. Two Alarming Incidents

  Chapter 11. The Surprising Things You Learn When You Spend a Day as Someone Else

  Chapter 12. The Story Takes Another Unexpected Turn

  Chapter 13. Bodkin’s Letter

  Chapter 14. Encanzo and Sychorax Have a Little Explaining to Do

  Chapter 15. The Chase

  Part Three: The Shadow Quest

  Chapter 16. The Beach of Shoes

  Chapter 17. In the Sea Cave of the Nuckalavee

  Chapter 18. Dead Boys Can’t Make Bargains

  Chapter 19. The Riddle of the Nuckalavee

  Chapter 20. Did You Think a Quest for Courage Was Going to Be Easy?

  Chapter 21. Will the Parents Be Too Late?

  Chapter 22. Inside the Mouth of the Nuckalavee

  Chapter 23. We Are All on a Quest Without Knowing the Rules Yet

  Chapter 24. Two Angry Parents

  Chapter 25. X Marks the Spot

  Chapter 26. Catch Them if You Can

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments (Thank-yous)

  Discover More

  Also by Cressida Cowell

  This book is dedicated to darling MAISIE with so much love

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  “HOW TO GET INTO THIS BOOK. Knock the Knocker on the Door… Then, if you are very quiet, you will hear a teeny tiny voice say… ‘Take down the key.’… Put the Key in the Keyhole, which it fits exactly, unlock the door and WALK IN.”

  JOSEPH JACOBS, English Fairy Tales, 1890

  Note by Cressida Cowell Lost-Language Expert

  A long time ago, a young girl exploring the back of a cave somewhere in the British Isles discovered these papers, known as the “Wizard books,” hidden behind a large stone. Nobody has ever been able to read them, for they were written so very far away in the distant past that they used a vocabulary and a script that has never been seen before.

  I have spent many happy years translating the papers of Hiccup the Viking from Old Norse into English. So I was excited to accept this even greater challenge, for these Wizard books were written in such a dark age that the language they used has been completely lost to us over the years.

  After many years of study, I have finally cracked the code of this lost language. And in doing so, I have uncovered something TRULY extraordinary.

  Believe the unbelievable.

  Every fairy story you have ever read has its basis in some truth.

  It was not only dragons living in the distant darkness. Dragons were only a very, very small part of it.

  This was a time of MAGIC.

  Prologue

  Once there were wildwoods.

  The Wizards had lived in the wildwoods for as long as anyone could remember, and they were intending to live there forever, along with all the other Magic things.

  Until the Warriors came. The Warriors invaded from across the seas, and although they had no Magic, they brought a new weapon that they called IRON… and iron was the only thing that Magic would not work on.

  From that moment on, Wizards and Warriors were fighting each other to the death in the wildwoods.

  Until one day…

  A young Warrior princess called SYCHORAX fell in love with a young Wizard called ENCANZO. Wizards and Warriors should NEVER fall in love. So Sychorax had taken the Spell of Love Denied to make her love die. And the love had died indeed… and Sychorax had married a Warrior, like she was supposed to.

  And Encanzo had married a Wizard, just as a Wizard should.

  So the danger of a curse ought to have been avoided.

  But…

  Thirteen years ago, Sychorax had a daughter whose name was WISH.

  And Wish had a terrible secret. The lingering true love’s kiss of the Wizard Encanzo had made Queen Sychorax’s daughter Magic. And Wish had a Magic-that-works-on-iron for the first time in human history.

  And thirteen years ago, Encanzo had a son whose name was XAR.

  And Xar had a terrible secret. Xar stole some Magic from a Witch, and the stain of the Witch Magic was beginning to control him.

  This is the story of how Xar and Wish met, and how they made friends even though they had been brought up to hate each other like poison.

  Wish and Xar have run away from their parents, searching for the ingredients for a spell to get rid of Witches. They are outcasts, hunted by Wizards and Warriors alike, and by something far, far worse.

  WITCHES.

  WITCHES MUST NEVER GET AHOLD OF MAGIC-THAT-WORKS-ON-IRON…

  But…

  Twice, Wish and Xar have escaped the talons of the Witches. TWICE, they have cheated death.

  1. Betrayal

  Three thousand years ago, at the end of the era that would later be known as the Bronze Age, the whole British Isles were covered in wildwoods.

  Good things lived in the wildwoods, animals and Magic creatures and humans who minded their own business, but bad things lived there at that time too, some very bad things.

  Two of these bad things were flying above the forest even now. The bad things were presently invisible, but if human eyes could have seen them they would have noticed that they had soft black wings like the wings of crows, and fingers that en
ded in talons like a bird of prey, and noses a little like a beak. In fact, they were WITCHES, not good Witches, but very bad Witches indeed, and they were flying high, just below the clouds, and as they flew they were watching something down below.

  The something was a door, but instead of being where a door really ought to be, vertically opening and shutting between rooms that are safely on the ground in an orderly kind of way, this particular door was flying through the air, flat on its front like a carpet, just above the treetops.

  It was the little moving speck of the flying door that had first attracted the Witches’ attention as they flew, with lazy wingbeats in the strong currents of air high above the trees, on their way back to their nests in the Lachrymose Mountains. But it wasn’t the door itself that was now holding their scrutiny.

  There were three children lying on their stomachs on top of the flying door.

  The invisible Witches looked down at the children.

  And the children looked down over the edge of the flying door, looking for something in the forest.

  The Witches were hungry, so hungry that long dribbles of black saliva were dripping from their lips. They hadn’t seen anything so delicious as these children in weeks, no, perhaps years (and that will give you an idea why people didn’t really like Witches, either in the Bronze Age, or any other age that the Witches happened to turn up in).

  But something was making those Witches pause before swooping on the tasty, unaware little morsels below and fastening their claws into them.

  “Tahw si ti gniod tuo ereh?” whined Breakneck, waggling her nose from side to side. “Yhw si ydobon gnitcetorp ti? Od uoy kniht ti dluoc eb a part?”*

  Ripgrizzle was pausing too, although the smell of the blood of the human children (which to a Witch is as delicious as that of a cake baking in the oven) was wafting up to him and making him drool like a dog. He was desperate to snatch the treats from under Breakneck’s waggling nose and fly back to his nest to feed on the tender darlings all by himself.

  But he too was cautious. Before the return of the Witches to the wildwoods, the air would have been full of flying things—birds and sprites and cockatrices, dragons, pixies, all manner of glorious magical creatures. But now, this early in the morning, which was too close to the night hours of the Witching-time, the forest was as quiet as death, and the Warrior humans kept their babies locked up safe in their castles, and the Wizard humans kept their babies safe in their treehouse forts. So what were these human babies doing then, flying, cool as you like, on the back of a magical flying door, miles and miles away from any human habitation? Perhaps Breakneck was right. Maybe it was a trap.

  The children were talking to one another, and one of them was singing rather shakily, with false bravery: “NO FEAR! That’s the Warriors’ marching song! NO FEAR! We sing it as we march along!”

  Ripgrizzle’s gigantic ears curled up at the edges, swiveling and tilting toward the child in order to catch the sound. The eye in the middle of his forehead opened up sleepily. The two Witches flew, unseen, lower, lower, to listen to the children’s conversation.

  The first young person was a Wizard boy called Xar (his name was pronounced “Zar”—I don’t know why, spelling is weird). The Witches did not know it, but Xar was the son of Encanzo, King of Wizards, and Xar had a very dangerous secret, which was that he had stolen some Magic from a Witch and was having trouble controlling it. The Witch Magic was hidden below a glove in a cut on his right hand, but the Witches could smell it nonetheless, and the smell confused them.

  The second was a Warrior princess called Wish, daughter of Sychorax, Queen of Warriors, and Wish too had a very dangerous secret, which was that beneath her eyepatch she had a Magic eye, and Warriors were not supposed to have any Magic at all.

  The third was a Warrior boy called Bodkin. Bodkin was Wish’s Assistant Bodyguard, and he was finding this position really rather testing because he didn’t like fighting very much, he had an unfortunate tendency to fall asleep in situations of physical danger, and trying to control the uncontrollable little princess was an impossible task because she seemed to have absolutely no idea what rules were at all. Bodkin was the one singing that song, rather unconvincingly.

  The three children were looking rather more ragged and sad than they had been two weeks earlier when they had run away from Wish’s and Xar’s parents. They had started out joyously, in the way that these journeys often begin. Running away had seemed like it would be an exciting adventure, but now they were hungry and tired and frightened, for they knew that they were being hunted by the Warriors and the Wizards and the Witches, and that they must never be caught. If the Warriors caught them, Sychorax would lock up Wish in iron Warrior fort where the Witches could not get ahold of her. If the Wizards caught them, Encanzo would lock up Xar in the prison of Gormincrag, where his Witch-stain could be treated. And if the Witches caught them… well that was such a scary idea our heroes were trying their hardest not to think about it.

  So for the past two days they had been looking for the house of the sister of Caliburn, Xar’s talking raven, where they hoped to be able to hide.

  “I KNOW my sister lives somewhere around here,” said Caliburn for the umpteenth time. “She moved here a while ago, back when I was still a human…”

  Caliburn was actually a Wizard who had lived many lifetimes, and in the previous one he had indeed been a human. And he hadn’t been just any old human either. He had been the great Wizard Pentaglion. Unfortunately Caliburn had come down in the world and returned to the wildwoods in this present lifetime in the form of a bird. (A rather untidy bird, for Caliburn was continually losing his feathers in his anxiety at the impossible task of trying to keep Xar out of trouble.)

  “I know that my sister has one of the ingredients we need for the spell to get rid of Witches, the tears of the Drood, and maybe we can persuade her to give it to us,” said Caliburn. “And she’ll give us a bed for the night and a good meal, and she’ll protect us for a while…”

  None of them were feeling very strong at all, and the idea of a bed for a night and a good meal was even more attractive than the idea that Caliburn’s sister might give them one of the ingredients they needed for their quest. In fact, it brought tears to Bodkin’s eyes.

  “What does your sister’s house look like, Caliburn?” asked Bodkin.

  Caliburn looked a little shifty. “Oh, you know, just like any other old human habitation. I haven’t been there in years. I’ll know it when I see it.”

  “Your sister must have a very big house,” said Wish doubtfully. “Look how many of us there are! Are you quite sure she’ll want to have all of us stay?”

  Caliburn gave an airy wave of his wing. “Oh, my sister has loads of room! Of course she’ll have us all stay…”

  “Even though we’re a bit, well… ODD?” said Wish wistfully. “I can’t believe that your sister won’t mind about us being Wizards and Warriors working together, Caliburn—everyone else hates that. And some people even might say we were sort of… cursed.”

  Wish was a little odd-looking—a funny little scrawny girl with hair so quivering with Magic that it vibrated and lifted with static electricity every time she moved. She had a pale face that looked as if the tide had washed over it and taken away all the sharp bits, and a kind but determined expression.

  That determination of hers was being severely tested. Her armor was dented, she hadn’t eaten in three days, and her face and hands and legs were deeply scratched from a terrible battle they had a week ago when they were ambushed by wyverns (a type of dragon very common in the Bronze Age).

  With all her heart Wish wanted to believe that Caliburn had a sister who would welcome them, even though they were outlaws, disobeying the laws of the wildwoods universe… but deep down she had a hollow feeling that this was very unlikely.

  “Let’s face it, Caliburn,” said Wish, trying to be practical and not mind too much. “We don’t really fit in anywhere. No one is going to want us.”
/>   “My sister isn’t as prejudiced as everyone else,” said Caliburn. “There are kind people in the world. You just have to find them.”

  “You’re quite sure your sister hasn’t died and come back as a raven too, and the reason we can’t find her house is that she’s now living in some sort of NEST?” said Bodkin suspiciously.

  “No, no,” said Caliburn. And then, less certainly, “Probably not…”

  Bodkin didn’t quite know how to say this without hurting Caliburn’s feelings, but they had been searching for Caliburn’s sister’s house for quite a while now without finding any sign of it. “Are you quite sure that you’ve got this right, Caliburn?” said Bodkin. “You’ve only just remembered that you HAVE a sister.”

  “Living many lifetimes is difficult,” said Caliburn, rather flustered. “It takes a while to remember what happened in the previous ones. But now that my memory has been jogged I know I have a sister and she’s down in that forest somewhere…”

  “Well, I think we should give up looking for your sister and march right into that Drood stronghold on the Lake of the Lost and just take their tears from them,” said Xar, who was not a patient person.

  “You don’t understand!” said Caliburn. “The Droods are unrelenting, unforgiving, and the greatest Wizards in the wildwoods, and they really don’t like having their tears taken! They’ll kill us if they catch us… Much easier for my sister just to GIVE them to us…”

  And then Wish spotted something that wasn’t the welcoming fires of Caliburn’s sister’s house, but something much more sinister.

  “Some people are following us down there in the forest,” whispered Wish, putting up her eyepatch a smidgeon because she could see better through her Magic eye. Sure enough, down in the tangle of green woods below them, way in the distance, there were the little flickering lights of many, many torches coming through the trees in their direction.