1. Raglan Skein leaves his body and flies away with just his sight and hearing to spy out the land before an upcoming difficult journey.
2. He observes the mountainous terrain of the island, avoiding the volcanoes. Villages near the mountains expect to lose people to eagles each year.
3. Skein sees the coastal towns below as hives of scheming people, fueling his fears about betraying the Lost Council's plans to negotiate with the tribes.
1. Raglan Skein leaves his body and flies away with just his sight and hearing to spy out the land before an upcoming difficult journey.
2. He observes the mountainous terrain of the island, avoiding the volcanoes. Villages near the mountains expect to lose people to eagles each year.
3. Skein sees the coastal towns below as hives of scheming people, fueling his fears about betraying the Lost Council's plans to negotiate with the tribes.
1. Raglan Skein leaves his body and flies away with just his sight and hearing to spy out the land before an upcoming difficult journey.
2. He observes the mountainous terrain of the island, avoiding the volcanoes. Villages near the mountains expect to lose people to eagles each year.
3. Skein sees the coastal towns below as hives of scheming people, fueling his fears about betraying the Lost Council's plans to negotiate with the tribes.
1. Raglan Skein leaves his body and flies away with just his sight and hearing to spy out the land before an upcoming difficult journey.
2. He observes the mountainous terrain of the island, avoiding the volcanoes. Villages near the mountains expect to lose people to eagles each year.
3. Skein sees the coastal towns below as hives of scheming people, fueling his fears about betraying the Lost Council's plans to negotiate with the tribes.
Text One for Section A, an extract from Gullstruck Island by Frances Hardinge
Gullstruck Island is inhabited by various tribes, including the Lost and the Lace. *** It was a burnished, cloudless day with a tug-of-war wind, a fine day for flying. And so Raglan Skein left his body neatly laid out on his bed, its breath as slow as sea swell, and took to the sky. 5 He took only his sight and hearing with him. There was no point in bringing those senses that would make him feel the chill of the sapphire-bright upper air or the giddiness of his rapid rise. Like all Lost, he had been born with his senses loosely tethered to his body, like a hook on a fishing line. He could let them out, then reel them in and remember all the places his mind had visited meanwhile. Most Lost could move their senses independently, like snails’ eyes on stalks. 10 Indeed, a gifted Lost might be feeling the grass under their knees, tasting the peach in your hand, overhearing a conversation in the next village and smelling cooking in the next town, all while watching barracudas dapple and brisk around a shipwreck ten miles out to sea. Raglan Skein, however, was doing nothing so whimsical. He had to take his body on a difficult and possibly perilous journey the next day, and he was spying out the land. It was a relief to 15 see the world plummet away from him so that everything became smaller. More manageable. Less dangerous. Scattered around the isolated island of Gullstruck dozens of other minds would be adrift. Lost minds, occupied with the business of the island, keeping it functioning. Scrying for bandits in the jungles, tracing missing children on the rises, spotting sharks in the deeps, reading 20 important trade notices and messages long distance. In fact, there might even be other Lost minds floating near him now, indiscernible to him as he was to them. He veered towards the mountain ridge that ran along the western coast, seeing the individual peaks emerge from the fleece of clouds. One such peak stood a little proud of the rest, its coloration paler. It was Sorrow, the white volcano, sweet, pure and treacherous as snow. Skein 25 gave her a wide berth and instead veered towards her husband, the King of Fans, the tallest middlemost mountain of the ridge, his cratered head forever lost in clouds. For now the King was docile and hazy with the heat, but he too was a volcano and of uncertain temper. The shimmering air above his slopes was flecked with the circling forms of eagles large enough to carry a child off in each claw. Villages on this coast expected to lose a couple of their number to 30 the eagles each year. But these eagles would have no interest in the little towns that sprawled below. As far as the great birds were concerned, the towns were just more animals, too vast and sluggish for them to bother with, scaled with slate and furred with palm thatch. The muddy roads were the veins, and bronze bells in white towers tolled out their slow, cold heartbeats. 35 For a moment Skein wished that he did not know that every town was really a thriving hive of bitter, biting two-legged animals, full of schemes and resentment and hidden treachery. Yet again the fear of betrayal gnawed at his mind. We will talk to these people, the Lost Council had announced. We are too powerful for them to ignore us. Everything can be settled peacefully. Skein did not believe it. Three days more, and 40 he would know if his shadowy suspicions had flesh to them. There lay the road he would travel over the next few days. He scribed it carefully. Even though he had left for the coast quietly and with haste, there was always a chance that news of his arrival had outstripped him, and that enemies lay in wait. And it was no mean task, spying out ambushes and surprises on this coast of all coasts. 45 Everything about it reeked of trickery and concealment. There were reefs beneath the water of the bay, betrayed only by the foam fringes on the far waves. The cliff-face itself was a labyrinth. Over centuries the creamy limestone had been hollowed and winnowed until it was a maze of tapering spires, peepholes and snub ridges like sleeping lions. So it was all along the west coast of the island, and it was this that had given the Coast of the Lace its name. 50 The tribe who lived here nowadays was also known as ‘the Lace’, and they too were full of ins and outs and twists and turns and sleeping lions pretending to be rocks. You never knew where you were with the Lace. 53
Glossary 1. whimsical: playful, amusing
Section A: Reading
Spend 30 minutes on this section.
Read the Text in the insert, and answer questions 1–11.
1. Look at lines 3–5.
(a) What figurative technique is used? Tick (√) one. [1]
1) simile 2) oxymoron 3) hyperbole 4) onomatopoeia
(b) The writer also uses sibilance. What effect does this create? [1]
(b) Give evidence from the text that tells the reader that Raglan Skein’s journey will take longer by body than it has taken him by his senses. [1] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(c) Give a three-word phrase that means ‘were hiding, ready to attack’. [1]
Idea: you might be attacked Evidence: ambushes and surprises / trickery and concealment Idea 1: Evidence 1 ------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Idea 2 Evidence 2 ------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
11. Look at lines 51–53.
(a) Here refers back to the previous paragraph. Give one more adverb that does this. [1]
(b) What do you think the Lace people are like? Give two ideas and support each idea with evidence from the text. [4]
First idea: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
