1. Escape from Garmimcrag is impossible

It was a quarter past midnight, four weeks before Midwinter's End Eve, and a thirteen-year-old boy was dangling precariously from a disintegrating home- made rope hanging from outside the darkest tower of Gormincrag, the Rehabilitation Centre for the Re-Education of Dark Magic and Wicked Wizards

(That, by the way, is a long and fancy name for a jail, and not just any old jail, the most secure and impregnable jail in the wildwoods)

The boy's name was Xar- (which is pronounced "Zar - I don't know why, spelling is weird) and he really, really, really should not have been there.

He was supposed to be INSIDE the prison, not OUTSIDE it, dangling fifty feet above sea level from one of the windows. That's one of the most important rules about that prisons, and Xar really should have known

But Xar was not the kind of boy who followed the rules

Xar acted first, and thought later, and this was exactly what had led him to be put in the Gormincrag Rehabilitation Centre in the first place, and given him the reputation of being the

naughtiest, wildest boy born into

the Wizard kingdom in about

four generations.

See if you think that reputation is justified In the past week, for example. Xar

had:

put what was supposed to be Sleeping Potion into the Rogrebreath guards' wine, but it turned out to be Cursing Potion instead glued the bottoms of the entire Drood High Command to their chairs in the hope that it would give him time for a quick getaway - but forgot to glue the chairs to the floor, so the Droods just ran after him with chairs stuck to their bottoms... treated

Part one escape :(1)

Himmself to some stolen Inviability Pon, but unfortunately I had only made his HEAD disappear, giving the Drood in charge of Reprogramming a terrible shock because he imagined on ting Xar's cell that the prison had been invaded by headless GHOSTS

None of these disobedient things had been Intentional, exactly. They had all just happened by accident, in the course of him trying to escape. for even though Xar was a happy-go-lucky cheerful sort of person, two months of imprisonment had given even his high spirits a bit of a battering, and his quiff of hair had drooped a little under the pressure, and he had been feeling, at times, a little desperate.

Gormincrag was well known to be impossible to escape from, but Xar never let a little thing like impossibility put him off. So although to an outsider his present predicament might have looked pretty bad. Xar was remarkably pleased with himself for a person who was hanging on to a crumbling rope swaying violently above seas known to be infested with such dreadful monsters as Blunderbouths, Daggerfins, and Bloody Barbeards.

His wide-awake eyes were bright with excitement and hope.

T O B E C o n t i n u e

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***