Free Ravenspell Book 1: Of Mice and Magic by David Farland Page B

climbed under the fence, stopped at the tree line, and checked the sky for owls. His house was on the far side of the yard. The grass hadn’t been mowed all winter, and he thought about creeping through it with the light but realized it would be faster to run for it.
    “Better yet, just leap over it, silly,” Ben told himself. “You’re a jumping mouse. Jump with your back feet and land on your front, like Amber does.”
    Ben held the rock in his mouth, gave a hard kick with his rear legs and hurtled what felt like a hundred feet in the air and four hundred feet into the distance. It was like jumping over a football field in a single bound!
    As soon as he hit the grass, which bent beneath his weight like a trampoline, he bounded in the air again, kicking harder. This time he leaped what felt like two football fields.
    Wow! he thought. I really am a jumping mouse!
    Ben vaulted into the air again. Look at me! he thought, stretching his paws out before him. I’m Super-vermin!
    It was the most glorious feeling that he’d ever had. It was like flying without the hassle of flapping your arms. He leaped again, doing a forward flip, and managed to get whacked in the face with the head of a wheat stalk.
    He leaped again, this time doing a triple spin in the air. Thus he bounced through the yard, dodging dried weed stalks. The light showed the way. Even in the shadows, he could see the sprinkler lying in the grass and the hose coiled like a green snake. He spotted an old boot far below. As he neared the porch, he startled a sparrow hiding in the laurel bush.
    He scampered to the back garage door. It was an old, weathered, wooden thing and looked as if someone had bumped it with the car. The bottom panel bent up just a bit. Ben squeezed into the garage.
    It was a typical garage, big enough for two cars and with a pair of windows to let in the light. His dad’s workbench filled the right wall, with lots of heavy power tools and hammers and wrenches resting on pegs above it. Shelves full of camping gear and brown boxes filled the left wall.
    Next to the tent were lots of things that he couldn’t use—lanterns, flashlights, a big cooler, camping stove, fishing gear, binoculars. All useless to a mouse.
    A gray pill bug was crawling on the floor in front of him, tramping about on fourteen pale feet. Compared to Ben’s small size, the bug looked as big as a poodle. It was giggling to itself, walking in zigzag, and muttering, “Poo-poo. Te he he. Poo-poo.”
    “Hello,” Ben said.
    “Poo-poo,” it screamed and rolled itself into a ball like an armadillo, so that nothing showed but its gray armor. It looked just about the size of a soccer ball.
    Ben imagined a net in the corner and kicked the bug.
    “And Benjamin Ravenspell wins the World Soccer Cup again,” he shouted, imagining the cheering of a billion fans around the world.
    The pill bug rose high into the air, dropped toward a corner, and just stopped—in midair.
    “Hey, thanks!” a deep voice called.
    Ben peered into the shadows and saw a dismal web spanning from corner to corner. A dry bug, maybe a cricket, hung like a bizarre piñata at the lower end. The pill bug had hit the web. A spider was running along the strings toward the pill bug. It quickly began wrapping it into a ball.
    “Hello, spider,” Ben said.
    “Cob. Call me Cob,” the spider said.
    “Are you going to eat that bug?” Ben felt guilty. He hadn’t meant to kill the thing. It felt like he’d fed Amber to the lizard all over again.
    “Yep,” Cob said, still wrapping it tighter and tighter. “First good meal I’ve had all winter.”
    “I didn’t want to hurt it,” Ben said. “I wasn’t trying to feed it to you.”
    The spider leaped down from its web, came close, and stared at Ben with all eight eyes. It was a small spider, so tiny that Ben could almost see through its carapace.
    Cob said, “It’s just a bug. There’s not many bugs smart enough to count their own feet. That one was an