It was getting louder now, slashes of high-pitched noise piercing the thunderous roll.
“Whatever it is, it doesn’t sound good,” Willam said behind him.
The young pirates peeked back and grinned.
The path was gone entirely now, the forest thinning out to open grass that craned steeply uphill, with the ominous buzz coming from beyond it. Hort followed his fellow prisoners up the slope, his legs burning, pushing the limits of fatigue. He could hear Dot panting and Bogden’s puny wheezes, but no one flagged, the amplifying rumbles propelling them forward. Hort’s heart beat faster, surging blood into his muscles, begging him to run and get his friends out of here as fast as he could. But there was no escape from what was coming. It was time to find out the Evil they faced.
Soon they were at the crest, sopping with sweat. Thiago and Wesley fell back with leering smiles, ceding way for their captives to see what lay down below.
The seven crew members huddled together in a ball, the chain folding around their bodies. They peered over the hill.
Hort instantly felt sick.
From his vantage point, he could see four kingdoms in the distance converge on a plot of land in the middle, about 100 yards wide and 50 yards long. From the east, he glimpsed the midnight-blue castle and rising pink moon of his home kingdom, Bloodbrook; from the south, the green peapods of Kingdom Kyrgios; from the north, the kingdom of Ravenbow, with its steaming rivers of blood and towers made of bone; from the west, the outlying vales of Jaunt Jolie, awash in Easter-egg colors. All four kingdoms smashed up against the Four Point, sealed off by four walls made of frozen water, jagged and brittle, as if a waterfall had frozen midflow. The iced walls were at least fifty feet high over the Four Point, shivering with sonic roars.
But now Hort saw what was making the noise.
Bodies.
Thousands and thousands of them—and not just human: dwarves, giants, trolls, dwarves, fairies, nymphs, goblins, and more—assailing the frozen walls from every direction, screaming and kicking and battering them with weapons, revolting against what was inside.
Slowly, Hort’s eyes lifted.
Inside the Four Point, a colossal gallows loomed beneath a pink-and-gray sky like an open-air theater. Dozens of nooses hung from beams above the high wooden platform, arranged in three distinct rows.
Only the nooses weren’t made out of ropes, Hort realized, as they gleamed in the few scraps of sun coming through the clouds. They were made of thick black scales and instantly familiar. Because they reminded him of . . . eels.
That wasn’t the worst part, though.
The worst part was that the second and third rows of nooses were already filled, the prisoners’ heads slipped through the scaly black loops and their feet planted firmly on trapdoors beneath them. The moment the trapdoors opened, each person would fall through and be hanged.
High above the prisoners, Camelot’s flag fluttered from a pole speared through the stage.
Heart racing, Hort tried to see past the empty first row of nooses to the faces of the prisoners in the second and third rows, but the darkening sky had left most of them in shadow—
“Isn’t that the King of Jaunt Jolie?” Dot said.
As Hort’s eyes adjusted, he made out the king’s sullied robes and broken crown. In the nooses next to him were his two young boys and his queen—a queen that the Snake had already declared dead.
“Get everyone to think she’s dead and then kill her in front of them,” Hester murmured. “Make them grieve twice. What better way to scare people?”
“Not even Granny would have thought of that and she was the White Witch,” said Anadil, unnerved.
Panicked citizens of Jaunt Jolie bashed against the iced walls in their pastel-colored clothes, screaming and begging for their leaders to be saved, for the young princes to be spared. . . .
As they listened to these pleas, Hort felt his fellow crew members instinctively huddle closer.
“Wait, that’s the king of Bloodbrook!” he said, recognizing the great gray man-wolf who led his home kingdom, noosed up in the second row. Citizens of Bloodbrook, including dozens of man-wolves, beat the walls with weapons and tried to ram them down.
“Walls are still holding,” said Hester. “Even with the Lady of the Lake powerless, whatever charm she put on the waterfalls hasn’t broken yet.”
“But if the walls are holding, how’d the prisoners get inside?” Dot asked.
Hester looked at her.
“Hester,” said Anadil.
Hester tracked her gaze to a black-haired man in a noose with gold flakes in his long beard and hair.
“Pea-man,” said Dot, remembering the Grand Vizier they’d interviewed to be School Master.
Ravenbow too had its queen strung up and its people rushing the frozen walls, desperate to set her free.
Once upon a time, leaders of Good and Evil fought over this piece of land.
Now they’d be killed on it together.
But there were no guards on the stage, Hort realized . . . no pirates or henchmen or executioners . . .
Dot was right. How had the leaders been captured?
And who was going to hang them?
“Hort?”
He turned and saw Nicola nestled in next to him.
“The first row,” she said.
Hort followed her eyes to the empty nooses, black scales shining.
“There’s seven of them,” said Nicola, trembling. “And there’s seven of us.”
Everyone stared at her, overhearing—then at each other, then at Hester. But even the fearless witch looked afraid. So did her demon.
Nicola’s eyes welled up. “I want to go home, Hort,” she whispered. “I want to see Pa.”
Gone was the cool, unflappable girl, replaced by a first-year Reader far away from her real life.
It only made Hort want to protect her more. The way Nicola had protected him and their crew.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the spot where the two pirates had just been—
“They’re gone!” Hort blurted, spinning to the group. “The pirates aren’t here. There’s no one guarding us! We have to run—we have to run now—”
A boy’s scream came from the valley, rising over the roar: “HELP!”
Hort stopped cold.
Another scream echoed, this time a girl’s: “PLEASE HELP US!”
Hort’s face went white and he saw the three witches gaping at him with the same expression.
Slowly they looked back down at the gallows.
Not at the empty first row or the second filled with royal leaders . . . but at the third row, which they couldn’t quite see. The row where the screams had come from. Screams that made Hort’s stomach flip.
Because one scream had been Kiko’s.
And the other scream was Ravan’s.
“He has our classmates,” Hort rasped, making out Mona’s green skin . . . Brone’s bald head and hulking frame. . . .
“Hey, guys,” said Nicola—
“We’re not leaving our friends down there,” said Hester, fear burning to anger. “Questers defend each other, no matter what. We have to help them.”
“But how can we get over the walls if we’re chained up?” Anadil asked.
“And how can we get through the crowd?” said Hort.
“Guys,” Nicola said.