The Monster Apprentice

By Felicity Banks and Tash Turgoose

The only weapon Dance has is her name.
When pirates threaten the tiny hidden island of Luar, Dance knows her home has only one hope of survival: the magical monsters that killed her twin sister.
Dance loses her friends one by one as she attempts to prepare her strange apprentices for the showdown between monsters and pirates. Can she do it alone?
The Monster’s Apprentice is a powerful story of looking at the world differently and finding an answer in an unexpected place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Odyssey Books
• Release date: Jul 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781925652147

Book preview

Chapter One

I awoke from a dead sleep—for once, a sleep without nightmares. My bedroom was pitch black and silent, but my heart was racing. Then the sound came again—a man shouting at the top of his voice. He pounded at my family’s front door.

‘Elder!’ The man’s voice was sharp with terror. ‘Elder, wake up!’

The night air was hot and still. My sheets lay in a crumpled heap on the floor. At the open window my curtains hung in unmoving black lines. No wind slid through to ease the stifling heat. My long black hair felt heavy around my head. I didn’t dare move.

Dad would check on me before he went to answer the yelling. Ever since my twin sister died, he was that type of dad. Whenever he felt worried about something, I was told to go to my room—to sleep, if it was night time. No matter how many nightmares I had. He was forever telling me to be careful, but I was definitely not going to miss out on the fun this time. So I remained curled on my side as if I hadn’t heard a thing. If he didn’t tell me to go back to sleep, sneaking out wasn’t disobeying him. Not exactly.

‘Elder, please!’ The man’s voice broke, and I recognised him. It was Watchman, who spent each night staring out over the sea. Like everyone else on the island, Watchman was named for his job. Like my dad, Elder. Like me: Dance. I’d always thought ‘Watchman’ was the dullest job ever invented, but now I felt my first delicious shiver of real fear.

Still I didn’t move. I stared at my curtains, since they were directly in front of me. The black stripes looked like prison bars. Everyone on the island had jail-bar curtains, since only one ship had brought curtains to Luar in twenty years. Dad could have organised more traders, but he chose instead to keep Luar Island as secret as possible. He wanted everyone to be safe.

Watchman hammered again on our heavy wooden door. I held my breath. Something was happening, and I was going to find out what it was—no matter what.

My bad eye skittered to the side, giving me half a view of the three carved masks hung on hooks on my wall—my most recent school project, worth a king’s ransom on any other island. Luar Island’s odd trees didn’t grow anywhere else—only magic could explain how they grew at all—and as a result Luar’s art was more delicately carved than anywhere else in the world. And more valuable. We only used it for art—never for houses or burning. And on Luar, everyone was an artist.

‘Elder!’ cried Watchman. ‘Elder!’

‘I’m here!’ Dad called back.

The air tasted thick, like porridge. I wrinkled my nose at the smell of my own sweat, and listened to Dad’s measured footsteps. Dad never hurried anywhere. My door shushed inward as he checked on me. I kept my breath steady as he whispered, ‘Sleep well, Dance.’

It was only then that he went to answer Watchman. Yellow light from his candle danced beneath my door, casting monstrous shadows.

After I counted three of his footsteps, I placed my own feet one by one on the cool trader wood of the floor. I slipped my shoes out from under the bed and put them on, lacing them tightly. Biting my lip, I ignored the clumsiness of my shaking hands.

If Dad called me I’d be dressed and ready: a proper daughter to Luar’s Elder. Just like my sister would have been.

If he didn’t call me, there was always the window.

The front door squeaked as it opened. Watchman stopped yelling. Usually he spent the night huddled on the far hilltop, keeping an eye out for the rare ships that knew to bring grain or cloth to trade for our precious carvings. It was his job to light the beacon fire to guide them to shore.

‘Raise the village,’ he gasped. ‘Pirates!’

I caught my laughter just before it escaped and revealed my eavesdropping. Pirates? Here? No one had attacked us for a hundred years. I wondered if this was a new nightmare and pinched myself.

‘It’s true.’ Watchman’s voice broke and he cleared his throat. ‘One of our merchants must have betrayed us. Any pirate would pay well for news of such an easy target.’

‘Are you certain?’ Dad’s voice remained carefully level.

Watchman cleared his throat again—or maybe he was choking back sobs. ‘There are three red lights on the ocean, and they’re coming closer.’

He’s mistaken. He has to be.

‘We have two hours until they’re here—maybe less.’

‘A fleet?’ Dad asked.

‘No,’ said Watchman. ‘Not as far as I can tell. But three red lights. It means—’

‘No quarter,’ said Dad. ‘Yes.’

I shivered, recognising his tone of voice. Dad turned eerily calm when he was angry. On Luar, there was a secret everyone knew and no one said aloud: when Dad yelled at my sister that day, the monsters came up out of the ground. Together, Dad and the monsters caused Armoury’s death. He’d never yelled again.

‘Please sir, what do we do?’ Watchman asked.

Dad asked if he’d seen any details of the ship: the size, the weapons, the crew—anything.

‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s no moon tonight, and I’m grateful they at least gave us warning of what they intend to do to us. But there’s nothing to see out there except the darkness, and those three lights winking on and off against the water.’

‘Very well,’ said Dad. ‘Take two runners and keep watch on the western cliffs as long as you can. I’ll pick two more, so you and I can stay in contact. Choose them—wake them yourself—and I’ll wake the rest of the village. We’ll gather in the town hall.’

‘But what will we do?’

‘Fight,’ said Dad, ‘if we have to.’ His voice was deeper than usual, an Elder’s voice. My wooden masks glowered at me from the curved outer wall of my room. ‘Which runners do you want?’

‘I’ll take Eldership—she’s good and fast—and Dance.’

My eyes widened at the sound of my name.

Dad scoffed. ‘Dance?’

I stiffened in the darkness. Why was Dad laughing at me? I kicked savagely at my heap of dirty clothes, sending underwear and stinky shirts tumbling across the floor.

So what if I was messy? Dad didn’t care. I wasn’t just a dancer. I was the second-fastest runner on the telking island—didn’t he even know that much about me?

‘Someone else, perhaps?’ Watchman said hastily.

‘No,’ said Dad.

Tears pricked at my eyes as I wondered what Dad’s face looked like. Was he frightened for me, like usual? Was that why he dismissed me so quickly?

‘Take Dance,’ he said at last. ‘She’s steadier on the ice than anyone else and has a level head too—when she chooses. I laughed because I’d planned to pick her myself. Take her—with my blessing.’

Dad’s letting me go? But isn’t it dangerous? I clutched handfuls of my scratchy black hair and pressed my fists to my head, trying to understand what was happening.

‘I’ll send her back to you first,’ Watchman promised, ‘as soon as I know anything.’

I crept closer to the glowing crack under my bedroom door.

Dad lifted his voice. ‘Dance! Get up and put on your shoes.’

I walked into the living room with my head held high. ‘I’m ready, Dad.’

Dad grew taller when bad things happened. He towered higher than ever, scaring me. His skin was darker than most and at night it looked as black as Luar wood. Something that might have been a smile softened his face as he looked at me, but only for a moment. ‘That was … quick.’

Idiot! ‘I hurried, Dad.’ I lowered my eyes. ‘Because you called.’

‘Mm. We’ll have a discussion about listening to my conversations tomorrow. For now, we have work to do.’

I placed myself at his side and forced my face into an expression that I hoped made me look more mature than my seventeen years. Hopefully my bad eye wouldn’t slide off to the side and make me seem like I wasn’t paying attention.

Watchman blinked hard, as if he was trying not to cry. His beard was ragged and his dark eyes darted back and forth between Dad and the door.

He wasn’t much older than me—just taller.

‘I’ll go wake Ellie for you,’ I offered, jumping in before Watchman could cry in earnest. ‘Eldership, I mean.’

‘Don’t forget to wake her family.’ Dad barely looked at me, and chose not to mention I’d just given him further proof that I was listening in. At least Mum was still getting dressed. The fewer witnesses the better.

‘Yes Dad,’ I said, wishing he’d told me to be careful.

I left them and ran outside, circling half our house so I could take the fastest way between several joined houses to Ellie’s place. Luar village was such a maze, maybe the pirates would get lost.

The ice of the ground chilled me through my shoes while I sweated from the heat of the air. It was little wonder the few traders who knew about Luar never stayed longer than they absolutely had to.

Luar Island was magic. Everyone could see that much, even before they stepped out onto the pure ice of the shore. No one could figure out why our iceberg island didn’t melt. It wasn’t natural for us to live on solid ice under the blazing sun. By rights, our home shouldn’t exist—and it was so misty it looked like it could agree and vanish at any moment.

Giant monsters swimming underneath you in the ice don’t help people feel at home, either. Even if you live here.

As if in response to my thought, something moved far beneath my feet, making the ground tremble. I shivered despite the heat. It was strange how the Heest monsters were so interested in us. Strange and deadly. They were huge, bigger than houses, and they travelled through the ice like other fish travelled through water. The ice melted and reformed with their passing, which meant our entire ice island was vulnerable to their whims.

I ran through the rest of the village, ducking around the hunched brown houses to reach my best friend’s house as directly as I could despite the village