Ravenspell Book 1: Of Mice and Magic Read Free

cannot fight them. We are powerless.”
    “Why?” the baby mouse asked weakly. “Why do they want us here?”
    “From time to time, the big pinkies take us from our prison. Some say that they love us and that when they take us, they embrace us—they usher us to their havens, where we are pampered and fed exotic foods. In the havens, the wood shavings are piled deep and every mouse has a warm corner where he can lie down in his own nest. There are running wheels and other toys to play with, and when you tire of them, the big pinky children preen you and cuddle you and give you the love that you deserve.”
    By now, the other mice had gathered around to listen. They circled Barley Beard and his ailing charge.
    “It sounds wonderful,” one young mouse said. “Why would she want to save us from that?”
    “Because,” Barley Beard said, “there is something better than being embraced. There is something called freedom .”
    He turned from the young mouse that had spoken, and studied the babe. She was small, blind, hairless, and too weak to move. “Once, long ago, another mouse came here a—wild mouse—who scurried under the pet shop door. He told about life beyond the cage, life away from the big pinkies, in a sunny place called the Endless Meadow. It lies just outside the pet shop, he said. It is a place that the Great Master of Field and Fen created just for mice. There food grows untamed atop the tall grasses, and all you have to do is shake a hay stalk, and grain tumbles to the ground. There, you can drink sweet water from dewdrops that cling to the clover. There, he said, beautiful wildflowers tower overhead in a riot of color. Wild peas grow thick among the fields, and strawberries lie fat on the vine, just waiting for you to nibble. There, he said, the sky fills with sunlight and rainbows by day, and twinkling stars and crescent moons by night.
    “The Endless Meadow,” Barley Beard sighed. “I have never seen it, except in dreams. But that is our true home. That is our destiny. And if you will live, little mouse, you can lead us there.”
    The baby mouse listened, but Barley Beard could not tell if she heard him. Her eyes were cloudy. Most likely, she was off in a dream, and she would slip in and out of it until she starved.
    All day long and far into the night, Barley Beard rested beside her, warming her with his own body, nuzzling her tummy so that he could stimulate it to hunger.
    He prayed to the Great Master of Field and Fen, begging Him to spare her. And at dawn his prayer was answered. A big pinky, a human woman that the mice called Feeder, came to their pens, humming an ancient tune. She carried away six blind kittens.
    “Hooray,” the kittens cried as Feeder lifted them. “We’re being embraced. Good-bye. Have a good life!”
    So the pet shop mice rejoiced for the young ones. And with them gone, the thirteenth mouse finally had a chance to get some food.
    But Barley Beard worried that the relief from hunger came too late. The little one had starved too long. “She’s so thin and sickly,” he mused, “will she even be able to lift her head to eat?” For though there was now space for her to drink, she was too far gone to crawl to her mother. That night, the young kitten lay as still as a corpse.
    Several times in the darkness, Barley Beard felt her chest fall, and then it seemed it did not rise again for a long time. He feared that she had stopped breathing altogether.
    But at sunrise, she raised her head once more and began to struggle through the deep wood shavings to her mother’s side.
    “Go,” Barley Beard urged her, tears flowing. “Go now and feed.” The other mice cheered, rallying her on, and the thirteenth mouse kicked until she reached her mother.
    On that glorious morning she fed.
    By the end of her first week, she began to grow. She looked different from other pet shop mice. She wasn’t brownish gray like her brothers and sisters. Instead, her coat came in with a slight