Wintercraft Read Online Free Page B

with his dog and the bowman close behind.
     
    Soon only the grey-eyed man was left in the cellar and he stood there, motionless, staring at the wall as if he could see Kate and Edgar cowering behind it. The bird on his shoulder cocked its head to one side and Kate pressed her nose right up to the stone beneath the eyehole, watching. She wanted to move back, but any movement might give her away. Edgar’s chest was wheezing with each nervous breath and she squeezed his hand, desperate for him to be quiet.
     
    ‘We’re ready, sir,’ came the bowman’s voice from the floor above. ‘There is a girl’s room on the top floor, but the rest of the house is clear.’
     
    ‘Very well,’ said the man. ‘Return to the square.’
     
    With the wardens gone, the grey-eyed man opened the lantern and slid a small book from a storage shelf beside him. He cracked the book open with one hand, touching its pages to the lantern’s exposed flame. They caught at once. The book smouldered and burned with growing fire, and he carried it up the cellar steps to begin his work.
     
    ‘He’s going to burn the shop,’ whispered Kate, as heavy footsteps crossed overhead.
     
    ‘Maybe he’s just trying to scare Artemis,’ said Edgar. ‘To make him tell him where you are.’
     
    The hot smell of burning paper crept in around them and Kate pressed the key into Edgar’s hand.
     
    ‘He’s doing it!’ she whispered. ‘Open the door. We have to get out.’
     
    Edgar fumbled with the key, dropping it in his panic. ‘Kate, that man …’
     
    ‘I know,’ said Kate. ‘Just get us out.’
     
    ‘No, you don’t understand …’
     
    Something thumped nearby. A door, slamming open.
     
    ‘What was that?’ Kate twisted back to the eyehole. The man had returned, his face glowing in the light of a flaming torch that blazed in front of him as he walked down the cellar steps. He stopped for a moment at the bottom, looked along the shelves one last time and then rammed the head of the lit torch into the box nearest to him, letting the flames catch, crackle and spread.
     
    ‘Oh no,’ said Edgar, desperately searching for the fallen key.
     
    The man moved to the next shelf, then another and another, until one side of the cellar was spreading quickly into a rising wall of flame. Edgar found the key and felt around for the keyhole, but Kate held him back, pulling on his arm with all her strength. The man did not hear the scuffle above the crackling noise of the flames. He threw the torch into the centre of the room, watched it splutter against the stone and then climbed back up to the doomed shop floor, leaving his deadly fire to spread and grow.
     
    Edgar struggled and scratched the little key into place, fighting to make it turn.
     
    ‘Stop! It’s too late,’ said Kate. ‘Listen to me!’
     
    Firelight seeped in through the open eyeholes, reflecting in Edgar’s frightened eyes as he turned to her. ‘The shop is on fire!’ he said. ‘We have to get out!’
     
    ‘No, we don’t. Give me the key.’
     
    ‘What? No! You said …’
     
    ‘Edgar, please.’
     
    ‘We’re going to die in here, Kate!’
     
    ‘No, we’re not.’ Kate tugged up a corner of the floor blanket and rapped her knuckles on what sounded like hollow wood where stone should have been. Edgar looked at her, confused.
     
    ‘I think Artemis knew what he was doing, putting us in here,’ she said. ‘There’s another way out. Please, Edgar. Trust me.’
     

3
     
    The Warrens
     

     
    Thick smoke swirled around the cellar, creeping along the stairs, up the chimney and under the door of the little hiding place. It crawled up Kate and Edgar’s noses like ghostly worms, making them cough and choke as the air around them was churned into a deadly soup.
     
    ‘Here.’ Edgar thrust the key into Kate’s hand and she wrestled the blanket out from under her knees, flapping it back to uncover a circular trapdoor with a sunken handle. Her fingers felt for