BVC Announces Mearsies Heili Bounces Back by Sherwood Smith
Mearsies Heili Bounces Back
CJ’s Second Notebook
by Sherwood Smith
Some things are even tougher to deal with than terrible enchantments . . .
“I am Princess Cherene Jennet Sherwood of Mearsies Heili, hater of evil, foe to all villains, and wielder of the prune pie of justice!” That’s how CJ Sherwood introduces herself when she lands into her craziest adventure yet. In this, the second volume of CJ’s records, she and her gang of friends gathered around the thirteen year old queen, Clair Sherwood, find themselves beset by magical spells and various villains. They still manage to have fun in the underground hideout in the middle of Mearsies Heili’s woodland.
CJ loves life with ‘the M girls’ — so she is completely unprepared to be taken away and put in a silken prison in order to forget being a princess. As CJ uses her brains and imagination to get out of trouble, she has to think about what being a princess really means.
She also discovers that there are things even tougher to deal with than terrible enchantments, sinister shadows, and lurking villains: teenage boys.
A novel of Sartorias-Deles, and CJ’s Second Notebook
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Sherwood Smith writes fantasy and sf.
1: Rainy epiDay
When I lived on Earth, there was a funny magazine my babysitter sometimes let me see. It was called MAD. Sometimes it had sequels of things, and they called them “Bounces Back.” Because I’ve finished rewriting this second notebook here, and because of some of the things that happened in, as well as to, Mearsies Heili, that “bounces back” pretty much fits.
Okay. When I left off in the first notebook, Clair, our queen, had finally gotten into contact with all the provinces of Mearsies Heili—except for the chopped-down forest that Glotulae Auknuge, sister to Fudalklaeb of Elchnudaebb, still claimed as her “kingdom.” What had once been a trade town on the Great North Road was now a city that supported the enormous palace we called the Squashed Wedding Cake, because that’s what it looked like to us. Self-appointed “Queen” Glotulae (nicknamed Fobo by us) was always adding more decorations to it, as well as statues of herself and her son Prince Jonicake (yes, she really and truly named her son Jonicake), who we called PJ.
Fobo and PJ wanted to take over the rest of Mearsies Heili, their motivation as far as we could tell, in order to have more people bowing down to them. And of course more wealth. Sometimes they were aided by the other villain we had to worry about, Kwenz of the Chwahir, who lived in the Chwahir outpost called the Shadowland below the cloud city that was also our capital. The Chwahir, like the Mearsieans, had come from another continent long ago, each making a colony in uninhabited land. The Mearsieans had come to escape the Chwahir, but guess who chased after them. The Chwahir like conquering. Most of their boys and men have to be warriors. Kwenz was very old, a master of dark magic, which is mostly used for force.
“Dark” magic is so named because it spends magic that takes ages to renew, unlike “light” magic. I think of magic as being like electricity, in which dark magic is always super high voltage, even if you’re just using it for a tiny purpose. It can zaps out the power grid in gigandor spells, making everything go dark. And it can electrocute you, if you’re not careful. Light magic uses low voltage so there’s always plenty in the world, and if you make a mistake, the spell just falls apart. Light magic takes longer to perform, because it has a lot of safeguards. I’ve been trying to learn it so I can help Clair, when Kwenz tried magical villainy against us.
In case you’re asking, who are we again?
There were now eight of us girls in Clair’s gang—nine, counting white-haired Clair, queen of Mearsies Heili. She’d been queen for somewhat over a year when we first met. Next was me, Cherenneh Jennet, serving as Clair’s second in command, or, as I liked to think of myself, her left-hand splat .As I said, I used to live on Earth, but someone else got stuck in my place and I got to come here. I’m short and skinny with long straight black hair and blue eyes.
Blond-haired Sherry had been living with Clair the longest. They’d made friends when they were little kids. Freckle-faced, red-haired Falinneh was our joker. You’d never know she was a shape-changer by nature—at least, her people, the Xubarecs, had been exiled for their habit of taking the forms of people who caught their eye and bumping off the originals. Falinneh was short and wiry, her hair so bristly it stuck out like a flaming bush unless she braided it.
Seshe was the tallest and oldest, having done the Child Spell at around fifteen, calm and smart, with very long ash blond hair. She loved the forest land and animals. Seshe talked even less than Diana about where she came from, but she sure knew a lot.
Diana was the quietest. She also loved the forest, and knew the most about things like woodcraft and also how to get past locked doors. As I said, Diana did not talk about her past; her dark eyes would go distant and she’d fade into the shadows if anyone started nosing.
Irenne couldn’t be more different. She loved to talk. She loved attention. She loved acting, drama, playing parts, and dressing up. She and Dhana were the moody ones. But that’s all they shared—Dhana wasn’t even human, except she’d borrowed our form for a time. She actually was a water being from the strange, rainbow hot spring we called the Magic Lake, right below the cloud city where Clair has her capital.
Gwen was the newest to our gang, a small, scrappy girl originally from Earth, with an amazing talent for mimicking voices.
We were all kids, including Clair, who had been studying light magic since she was little. Clair had found what was called the Child Spell, a spell that halted body changes toward puberty. As far as we were concerned, that meant we’d stay kids forever, which meant birthdays were extra fun. We got to celebrate but not cross into adulthood, so nobody would start getting mushy and disgusting about romance.
We girls had recently finished remodeling the Junky, our underground hideout, which had been cozy when there were only four or five of us, but had become crowded with nine. Everyone had her own room, and we’d even added some extras, in case we had visitors, and also, Clair wanted her cousin Puddlenose to have a room waiting for him if he and when he returned to visit. He had itchfeet, and Clair had given up on his ever settling down here or anywhere.
Clair and I had recently finished the connecting tunnels (once we’d decided that the rope entrances were only fun to go down, not up) and what happens? We all end up crammed in the main room most of the time. But the big difference was, we no longer had to stay crammed up—we only did when we chose to. Somehow that made everything work out better, especially for the moody ones.
When the weather was rotten outside—as it was the day I’m about to report—it was so cozy to gather in the main room with warm goodies to eat and drink, to talk and laugh. Maybe I’d sing and Dhana would dance for us. Sometimes Irenne, Falinneh, and Gwen, often with Sherry, put together skits for the rest of us to watch.
I wrote a lot of those up in my first records. All the jokes were there, even the ones we repeated a million times because it was just as funny, or almost as funny, to wait for the expected comeback as it had been the first time we heard it. But when I let a couple of people read those, I couldn’t help noticing that they skipped over those pages. I guess we’re not always as wonderful to other people as we are to ourselves, or maybe in-jokes and stuff just aren’t interesting to anyone outside the group. Or maybe it’s the way I wrote them up. That was my greatest of my many secret fears, that I, as the official archivist of our days, was lousy at it.
Despite all that, I decided to copy this one rainy day into the new notebook anyway. Partly because it is in some ways so typical of those quiet evenings, when it’s just us, and no big worries. (Because the big adventures tend to start out as big worries.) You could say that this one stands for all of them—lots and lots of lovely, fun evenings just like it. And partly because Clair so seldom told stories. That’s the non-typical part. And what she had to say, well, you’ll see.