Bell Mountain (The Bell Mountain Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

in an ancient and difficult language. You’d have to study hard for years, Ashrof said, before you could read them. “And the Temple would prefer you didn’t read them,” he would add. That was another thing that he’d explain when Jack got older.
    He fretted and fidgeted through the day. Van came home a little late for supper, complaining about the councilor who had to be driven all the way out to Oziah’s Wood and back the same day, just to see some cowherds who owed him money.
    The hardest thing of all was getting to sleep that night; but eventually Jack managed it.
    To his surprise, he didn’t dream about the mountain.
     

     
    Early morning found him in a little patch of woods not far from the stockade, hugging himself against the cold and grumbling against Ellayne for being late. She probably wasn’t coming at all, he thought. This was a joke, a big joke on him. Or else her father had caught her out at the last minute, and Jack would be blamed for the whole thing and sold down the river to unload barges in Obann for the rest of his life. He’d get her for that.
    Someone’s feet crunched dead leaves and sticks.
    “Oh—there you are,” Ellayne said.
    He hardly would have recognized her. She had boys’ clothes on, stout boots on her feet, and had tucked her hair up under a floppy cloth cap that otherwise would have been too big for her.
    “What kept you?” he snapped. “I’m freezing!”
    “It isn’t easy to sneak out of my house. The maid’s very nosy. Here, I brought you some things.”
    She laid down her bag and from it took out a knitted wool cap and a woolen jacket decorated with a yellow check pattern. It hung loosely on Jack’s shoulders, but it was the warmest garment he’d ever had on his body.
    “See if these boots fit,” she said. “They were my brother Josek’s, but he grew out of them. The cap is Dib’s, and he’ll be mad when he finds out it’s gone. Try not to lose it.”
    He had to stuff bits of torn-up cloth napkin into the toes; then the boots fit him well enough.
    “I guess we’re ready,” he said, stomping a little to get his feet used to their new homes. “Which way is Lintum Forest?”
    “It’s somewhere south of here. I don’t know how far. But it’s a big place. It shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
    That was good enough for Jack, because he knew no better.
     

CHAPTER 8
An Empty Land
    Jack knew a path that wound through the little woods. Ellayne followed him.
    “One thing I don’t get,” he said. “I’m glad you’re coming with me, don’t get me wrong—but why did you want to? You didn’t dream about the mountain. You never thought of it until you heard me talking to Ashrof. What made you want to do this?”
    She grunted as she yanked her pack free from some sticker bushes. “It’s hard to explain,” she said. “As soon as you said you were going to go up the mountain, I had to go, too.
    “I don’t know how to say it—but I want to do something! Not just grow up and marry whoever my mother and father want me to marry, and wear nice clothes, and never see anything and never know anything, except what everybody else in the world has already seen and already knows.”
    “Your ma and pa have been all the way to Obann lots of times,” Jack said. “You’d get to see Obann.”
    “Anybody can do that!”
    “I’m only asking because I don’t want you changing your mind and wanting to go back.”
    “I won’t!”
    It didn’t take long to pass through the woods. Jack noticed the green leaves were sprouting on the berry bushes just as they ought to sprout, in spite of the funny weather. Robins sang in the trees, blue jays scolded, cardinals chirped. Squirrels raced along the branches and up and down the trunks, pausing to chatter and scold.
    The children emerged from the woods.
    “So that’s the land!” Ellayne said. “I’ve never seen it before. There’s so much of it!”
    Before them, almost as vast as the sky itself, stretched a rolling