in a rush. ‘I mean … I could find your keys if you lost them, but I don’t think I could find an entire day … even if it was lost.’
Moreg raised a brow. ‘But you could try, couldn’t you?’
Willow considered. She could. There was nothing stopping her from at least trying. She took a deep, nervous breath, closed her eyes, and raised her arm to the sky, concentrated hard on Tuesday then –
‘STOP THAT THIS INSTANT!’ thundered Moreg, jumping out of her seat so fast she overturned her chair, which hit the flagstone floor with a deafening clatter. Willow gulped, while Moreg watched her lower her arm as if it were a dangerous viper. Clutching her chest, the witch took several sharp, shuddery breaths.
‘SUCH A FRIGHT! MY HEART!’
Willow’s voice shook as she spoke in a tone trying its absolute best not to make an accusation. ‘I don’t understand – you asked me to … try?’
Moreg rubbed her throat, and after a moment her voice went back to almost normal, though there was a faint squeak if you listened closely enough.
‘Q-quite right, quite right,’ she repeated. ‘Yes, I did. I do want you to try, just not quite yet. Dear Wol, no! Not without some kind of a plan first – we can’t just go in and get it. One can only imagine the consequences …’ she said with a violent shudder that she shook off. ‘Bleugh!’
At Willow’s frown Moreg explained. ‘I believe,’ she said, her black marble-like eyes huge, ‘that had you succeeded in finding the missing Tuesday and brought it into our current reality, the result would almost certainly have been catastrophic – it’s possible that the very structure of our universe would have split apart, creating a sort of end-of-days scenario …’
‘Pardon?’ asked Willow.
‘I believe it may have ended the world.’
Willow sat back, heart jack-hammering in her chest. Finding out that she could have ended the world was, to say the least, a sobering thought.
Moreg, however, seemed back to normal.
‘The thing is, until we know what happened we could just make things worse. Worse than it already is now, and right now it’s about as bad as can be imagined.’
Willow frowned in confusion. ‘What do you mean? I know it’s not … um, great that Tuesday has gone missing, but it’s not the end of the world, surely? It’s just one day …’
A day that no one seems to have missed anyway, so what was the harm, really? thought Willow.
Moreg blinked. ‘Actually, it might be the end of the world if we don’t find it. Whatever happened to last Tuesday may affect the very fabric of Starfell, causing it to unravel slowly, thread by thread.’
Willow’s mouth fell open dumbly as she gasped. She hadn’t realised it could be that serious.
Moreg nodded. ‘Which is why we will have to start at the beginning. We can’t very well proceed until we know for sure what happened. Or, more importantly, why.’
She looked out of the window, frowning slightly, then blinked as if she were trying to clear her vision. ‘There’s someone I think we’re going to need, someone who can help us … which might prove a little tricky as we need to find him first.’
‘Oh, why’s that tricky?’ asked Willow.
Moreg turned to look at her, a faint smile about her lips. ‘He’s an oublier, you see, one of the best in Starfell, no doubt, coming from a long line of them. The problem is that finding an oublier is almost impossible unless you know where to look.’
Willow looked blank. ‘An ouble— A what?’
‘An oublier. It’s in the Old Shel, you see.’ Which Willow had always taken to mean when words had more bits in it. Modern-day Shel was the language most people spoke in Starfell, apart from High Dwarf that is, but the latter was mostly because of all the colourful ways one got to swear. ‘It’s pronounced oo-blee-hair, or – as they are more commonly known today – forgotten tellers, people who see the past.’
‘Like the opposite of a seer?’
Moreg drummed her chin with her fingers. ‘Sort of—’
‘Like my mother,’ interrupted Willow, whose mother was a well-known seer, and took her travelling fair all across the kingdom of Shelagh telling fortunes.
Moreg seemed to have something stuck in her throat because she answered with a strained voice. ‘Er, yes, like your mother. Though most people who call themselves “seers” and say that they can see the future have no idea how it is really done, and often claim to have some connection to the “other side”, to the dead, who supposedly let them know when things are about to occur,’ she said with a disbelieving sniff. ‘True seers are, of course, very rare. But they have been known to read patterns in the smallest events, allowing them to see possible versions of the future. For instance, if they see a particular flower blooming in winter when it usually blooms in spring they can work out that a typhoon is coming in the summer.’
Willow stared blankly.
Moreg continued, ‘Unless they somehow encourage the last tree sparrow to build its nest before midnight on the spring equinox, for example. Do you understand?’
Willow made a kind of nod, mostly because it seemed like it was expected. But she didn’t really understand at all.
Moreg continued, not noticing Willow’s confusion. ‘Forgotten tellers, on the other hand, read people’s memories of the past, which come to them like visions when other people are around. They are, alas, rather unpopular compared to seers, and have very few friends, as you can imagine …’
Willow was puzzled. ‘Why’s that?’
‘Well, seers should be unpopular too. No one wants to be around someone who can predict their death … Yet so very few of them really can predict such things – so they make excellent friends as they always tell you just what you’d like to hear. Forgotten tellers, on the other hand, seldom, if ever, tell you what you’d actually like to hear. They tell things most people would prefer to forget, things you may wish to pretend never happened …’
Willow’s eyes bulged. ‘Really?’
Moreg nodded. ‘Oh yes. Take poor old Hercule Sometimes, a powerful forgotten teller. He was found drowned in a well after he walked past the Duke of Dittany and embarrassed him in front of the captain of the king’s army. The duke had been boasting that he had fantastic natural archery skills, and that the very first time he’d used a bow and arrow he’d hit the bull’s-eye. Apparently Hercule stopped in his tracks, slapped his knee, started chortling and said, “You mean when you fell over backwards in a field after you’d released the arrow and poked a bull in the eye with your bow?”’ Moreg chuckled. ‘See, he’d seen the duke’s memory of the day and, well, the duke was less than impressed, as you can imagine …’
‘But why did he tell the duke?’ gasped Willow.
Moreg’s lips twitched. ‘Couldn’t help himself – forgotten tellers see things as if they just happened. And they often blurt it out before they realise. They aren’t stupid – they’re just not always aware of what happens to them when they’re having a vision. Making for rather awkward social situations. As a result very few oubliers have lived to tell their tales and have an alarming capacity for turning up buried beneath people’s floorboards or at the bottom of wells. They often carry their own food for fear of being poisoned. They’re deeply suspicious of gatherings of people, partly because they get flooded with other people’s memories, and partly because the more visions they have the more chance they have of getting themselves into trouble by offending