Kingdom of Wrenly – The Bard and the Beast

Jordan Quinn's The Bard and the Beast is a short Kingdom of Wrenly adventure for 5 year olds, in which a prince is made to learn the lute against his will.

What happens

Prince Lucas has just lost a toad race, or possibly won it, depending on whether you ask him or Clara, who is his best friend. Either way he skids to a halt in the castle corridor covered in mud and toad slime, because his mother is standing in it and he is late for his first music lesson.

Master Aldrich offers him a floating golden harp (too many strings), a recorder (too many holes) and a set of bagpipes (too earsplitting). Lucas picks the lute mostly to stop him talking.

It is the ninth Wrenly book, and it does not expect you to have read the other eight. Who Clara is, who Ruskin the pet dragon is and what a bard does all get explained as you go.

The next day, picking berries on the island of the fairies, Lucas and Clara find an emerald green feather speckled with silver and gold, longer than his forearm. Then they hear a pipe playing nearby.

Will is a wandering bard. He studies every kind of music, including birdsong. He is listening to a mother fairywren teaching a song to her unhatched eggs, so that when they hatch she will know her own chicks calling and not something pretending to be them. He is also hunting a particular creature, one that will only answer to music.

Lucas thinks this is nonsense. There are no beasts in Wrenly.

The lullaby Will teaches him has three chords. Lucas makes it sound like a sick fly. Ruskin, who usually likes everything Lucas does, lies down and puts his claws over his ears.

Then they walk a little further into the woods and find a cave with another green feather lying outside it.

The whole thing goes down in one sitting. Very short chapters, big clear sentences, plenty of Ooooo and Creeeeak and Squawk to say out loud, and a dragon who behaves exactly like an excitable dog. If you have got a reader who is just starting to manage a chapter book alone, this is the sort that makes them feel they have got somewhere.

The thing to mention is the beast itself. Will shouts at Lucas to shut his eyes because looking into a basilisk's eyes will kill him, and the two of them have to play blind while it scratches its way closer. Earlier there is a tale about a hundred foot snake standing over a sleeping king. Both are over quickly and nobody is hurt. If yours is the sort who thinks about things at bedtime, read the cave chapters together.

What to read next

There is more of Wrenly waiting. In A Ghost in the Castle, Lucas wakes to moaning in the passageway and a glowing blue light that slips straight through a solid wall, with Ruskin already chasing it.