“You can tell them yourself,” Julian said with a smile.
Noa blinked. “What?”
“I want you to join the council. I need to listen to you more often, Noa—and so do my advisors.”
Noa stuck her finger in her ear, as if to clear it.
Julian waved a ringed hand. “Yes, yes. I know you’ve asked once or twice—”
“Once or twice!” Noa cried. “I ask you to put me on the council every week. You always say no!”
“Maybe I would be more inclined to say yes if you didn’t lurk outside the window every time we meet,” Julian retorted. “I’d move the meetings to the tower, but I’m worried you’d try climbing up the side of the castle.”
“I don’t ‘lurk,’” Noa said. “I’m not a thief. I just happen to be nearby sometimes.”
“Yes, scratching away in your Chronicle so loudly you’d think we’d been invaded by termites.”
Noa folded her arms. “I have to take notes. Have you even read your secretary’s? He includes everything that isn’t important and leaves out most of what is.”
Julian massaged the bridge of his nose. “Noa, Noa, Noa. Do you want to be on the council or not?”
Noa’s stomach fluttered. She could hardly believe what Julian was offering. A chance to be listened to, to have Julian’s chief advisors—many of whom had as much common sense as he did—consider her ideas and evidence and all the plans she had tucked away at the back of her brain for taking Florean away from King Xavier one island at a time. A chance to be helpful, rather than left to roam the island with Mite or to have lessons with whatever stammering teacher Julian had abducted for them that month. Not only that, but she’d be able to keep a closer eye on Julian, which could only help her secret mission.
“I accept,” she said in a dignified voice. “And as my first piece of advice as royal councillor, you should move the meetings to a different room. The current one’s too easy to spy on.”
Julian groaned.
7
Mite Goes on a Secret Mission of Her Own
A fierce wind blew across the island as it sailed north, lifting the salt spray from the waves and scattering it over the grasses and cacti. Waves hurled themselves against the shore, so large and glittery green that Mite’s knees trembled. She hopped from rock to rock, pausing to examine a big piece of driftwood for woodbugs. She found a line of them marching purposefully from one hole to another, where there was a nest of tiny eggs.
Julian thought she was asleep, but Mite had only been pretending. She had something important to do, and she knew that Julian wouldn’t let her leave the castle without Noa, and also that Noa wouldn’t want to go with her. Mite didn’t mind hiking across the island with Noa while she took notes in her Chronicle, but she wished that sometimes Noa would want to do what she wanted to do.
“You have so many babies,” she told the woodbugs. “Can I borrow some? I’ll bring them back when they’re grown.”
The woodbugs didn’t seem to mind. March, march, march went their many legs. Like her, they were clearly in the middle of something important. Carefully, Mite took a blade of grass and scooped a few of the eggs into a jar, which she placed in her pocket. She scurried off over the rock, her black cloak billowing behind her.
The waves were so large that they splashed her no matter how she tried to avoid them, and Mite almost lost her nerve. She kept close to the cliff and pretended that Noa was with her.
It was low tide, and a little beach of black basalt was exposed beneath the sea cliffs. This was where one of the mages said he had seen the spider.
Mite shivered with excitement. She had never seen a braided spider before—they were almost extinct in Florean. People had trapped them and hunted them until they were gone, because they were poisonous. Mite didn’t think this was fair. Spiders only bit when they were scared, which was something Mite could understand—after all, when she was scared, she exploded. So when she heard Julian order the mage to set traps along the cliffs, she knew she needed to go on a rescue mission.
“Hello! Coming through!” she called to warn the beach fleas to get out of the way. After a while, her stomach began to rumble, and she thought longingly of the licorice cakes back at the castle. She wondered if Anna, the cook, would let her have another before dinner. She’d only had five today.
Finally, she found the traps. After examining two empty ones and a third that held only a confused gray spider, which she set free, Mite’s luck turned.
Hunched in the back of the fourth trap over the body of a dead mouse, the braided spider was bigger than any spider Mite had ever seen, so big she wasn’t sure it would fit into the other jar she had brought with her. Fortunately, she had also brought along bait in the form of dead flies, and the spider darted into the jar to feast on them, neatly folding its legs inside. Mite twisted the lid on.
Now that she had found the spider, though, she wasn’t sure what to do with it. A storm was coming, and she didn’t have time to take it to the other side of the island where the mages wouldn’t find it. She would have to keep it in her room for now. The spider ran one long leg slowly along the glass, as if testing for weaknesses.
Mite’s stomach gave another grumble. She tucked the jar in her bag, then scrambled back the way she had come, her thoughts full of licorice cakes.
Mite didn’t get her cake. By the time she got back to the castle, someone had noticed she was missing and told Julian. She met some mages who had been sent out to find
