The Lost Gate Read Online Free

girls, it’s what they do!”
    â€œI knew that if I went to fetch you, Uncle Poot, they’d lie and say they were trying to be big.”
    â€œI wouldn’t have believed them,” answered Poot.
    â€œBut you wouldn’t have punished them, either,” said Danny. “So they’d just have kept on doing it.” He heard the other adults murmur their agreement.
    â€œSo now you’re a critic, is that it?” Uncle Poot replied. “Telling me that I’m not good at training youngsters?”
    â€œIt doesn’t excuse you putting them in a sack!” said Zog. And the adults murmured their agreement at that, too.
    â€œI didn’t have a sack,” said Danny. “I stood there right in front of them and took off my shirt and walked right over to them. It was plain enough what I was doing—if they’d been paying any attention. I didn’t expect to actually catch them with my shirt! I just wanted to give them a scare, remind them to take their study seriously. But when I found that two of them were in the shirt, I didn’t know what to do. If I just let them go, they’d mock me and I’d never be able to get them to do what’s right without bothering some adult. The whole point of having me watch them is so none of you has to be bothered, isn’t it?”
    Even as he said it, though, Danny realized that he had just declared that it was impossible for him to tend the clants if the other children didn’t want him to; he wouldn’t save the adults any time at all, and so they might as well have one of them do the minding and leave Danny out of it. But what choice had he had? The accusation Crista made was so terrible, and with Gyish and Zog calling him a drekka, one who could be killed whenever it was convenient, there was a great danger that the trial would end suddenly with Zog tearing his head off and tossing it into the trees.
    â€œSo you trapped them in your tee-shirt,” said Aunt Lummy. “And you didn’t let them go. Where are they now?”
    â€œCrista’s clant was going for my eyes and so I did brush her aside. And then to get away from her, I climbed a tree.”
    â€œAnd yet you are not in a tree,” said Uncle Mook. “And you seem to have neither your shirt nor the clants of two disobedient and stupid girls.”
    â€œI tied the shirt to a branch and climbed down and I was just going to fetch Uncle Poot and turn their clants over to him when Great-uncle Zog and Grandpa Gyish attacked me.”
    â€œNo grandpa of yours!” shouted Gyish, though this was only partly true, since Danny’s mother, Gerd, was Gyish’s firstborn granddaughter.
    â€œI believe you,” said Mook. “But what you don’t know—what you could not possibly understand—is how terrified those girls are now. There’s nothing worse for an inexperienced child than to have your outself trapped and be unable to bring it back. It’s like you’re suffocating and can’t draw breath.”
    The others present murmured their agreement.
    â€œI’m sorry,” said Danny. “I really am. It’s not as if I planned it. I only did what came to mind, to try to get them to work on what they were assigned. I didn’t know that it would hurt them.”
    â€œLook at his shoulder,” said Auntie Tweng. “Look at that bruise. It’s like a truck ran over him.”
    â€œHe was trying to get away!” said Zog defensively.
    â€œHe was in agony,” said Tweng. “How dare you punish the boy before the rest of us were called?”
    â€œI didn’t punish him!” Zog roared. “I brought him!”
    â€œYou know your strength, and you’re responsible for what you do with it,” said Tweng. “You and Grandpa Gyish did this to him? It’s at least as bad as anything he did to those two girls—why, I wouldn’t be surprised if his clavicle