Free Chill by Alex Nye

shud decide to pry. The key I have hidden away so that no one will ever find it. The ebony box is where I keepe my treasures, things that are precious to me, although of little or no value to anyone else. I am sure that in the future my ebony box will prove useful. I shall store my most important secrets in it, and one day I shall hope to be buried with that box in my grave. Oh dear, “what a morbid thought,” Mrs Fletcher wud say, “for one so young!” I am not supposed to have secrets, but already I have one or two. Enough to require a box with a key.
    “A box with a key!” Samuel murmured.
    “Well,” Fiona said, smoothing out the crackling papers, “she certainly wasn’t buried with it, as she wished.”
    “We have to get back in the library. I want to know what’s inside that box. As she says herself, boxes hold secrets sometimes. I bet we’ll find the rest of the journal in there!”
    “How can we?” she sighed. “When will we have another chance like this one? The others will be back soon.”
    But Samuel had fallen mysteriously quiet, his eyes gleaming.
    “Like I said, we’ll go back at night, when everyone’s asleep.”
    “You can’t do that.”
    “Oh yes, I can,” he said.
    And she knew with a horrible sinking feeling that he meant it.

Trouble
    Charles and his brother Sebastian set off through the snow the next morning, into the woods above Dunadd. They wanted to be alone. Usually Fiona would have tagged along with them as well, but she seemed too busy these days.
    “She’s more interested in that boy from the cottage than us,” Charles mumbled.
    Sebastian cast his brother a sideways glance. “
That boy
has a name, you know. Anyway, I thought you were always glad to get rid of her? Not liking to be pestered by a kid sister, that sort of thing.”
    Charles said nothing.
    The snow was deep and they had to work hard to make their way uphill past the boating pond, which had completely frozen over. The stones around the edge were capped with glass, and the black reeds were caught in it too. The little blue rowing-boat at the end of the jetty was trapped in the ice as if it would never break free again. Their feet scrunched on dry snow.
    “I’m just trying to protect her,” Charles muttered.
    “Protect her?” Sebastian cried. “Well, there’s a first! What from, exactly?”
    “I don’t know. Things have been weird lately, that’s all.”
    Everything was white and glistening, sculpted andchiselled into strange shapes, but Charles was too preoccupied to appreciate the magic of it.
    “You worry about things too much,” Sebastian pointed out. “It’s all this snow. It’s getting to you, being stuck on the moor like this.”
    If only you knew
, Charles thought but didn’t say a word. Sometimes the burden of his father’s letter felt too heavy to carry all on his own.
    Sebastian ran ahead and threw a long spear-like stick into the forest, crying “Normal life will resume shortly.” Then he spun round to face his brother. “We hope.”
     
    Back at Dunadd, Isabel Cunningham stood in the middle of her workshop, and surveyed the scene before her. Scattered across the workbenches were the “instruments of her trade” as she called them, bits of wire, the bottoms of green glass bottles, multi-coloured beads and shiny pieces of material. Since moving to Sheriffmuir she had been very inspired, and felt that she had produced her best work. Her latest masterpiece was a garden ornament; a huge spider’s web made from wire coathangers and old spectacle lenses. It was designed to hang in the branches of a tree, where it could catch the sunlight and sparkle like an enormous version of the real thing. It was a wintry piece to match the mood of Sheriffmuir at that moment.
    She lifted her head and peered out of the small dirty pane of glass that served for a window. She still had her doubts about bringing Samuel here to live, the isolation for instance, but it was more than she could have hoped