مقدمه

PROLOGUE

FOWL MANOR, DUBLIN, IRELAND

BARELY an hour north of Dublin’s fair city lies the Fowl estate, where the boundaries have changed little in the past five hundred years.

The manor house is not visible from the main road, shrouded by a fan of oak trees and a parallelogram of high stone walls. The gates are reinforced steel with cameras perched upon their pillars. Were you allowed to pass through these discreetly electrified portals, you would find yourself on a pea-gravel avenue, meandering gently through what was once a manicured lawn, but which has now been encouraged to evolve into a wild garden.

The trees grow dense as you approach the manor itself, soaring oak and horse chestnut, intermingled with more delicate ash and willow. The only signs of cultivation are a driveway free of weeds, and the glowing lamps that float overhead seemingly without tether or cable.

Fowl Manor has been the site of many grand adventures over the centuries. In recent years, the adventures have had more of a magical bent, though most of the Fowl family have been kept in the dark about this fact. They have no idea that the main lobby was completely destroyed when the fairy folk sent a troll to do battle with Artemis, the family’s eldest son and a criminal mastermind. He was twelve years old at the time. Today, however, Fowl activity in the manor is entirely legal. There are no fairy special forces storming the battlements. No elfin police officers held captive in the cellar. Nor any sign of a centaur fine-tuning his listening devices or running thermal scans. Artemis has made peace with the fairy People, and formed solid friendships among their ranks.

Though his criminal activities earned Artemis much, they cost him more. People he loves have been distraught, injured and even abducted because of his schemes. For the past three years his parents thought him dead, while he fought demons in Limbo. And on his return he was flabbergasted to find that the world had moved on without him, and he was now the older brother to two-year-old twin boys, Beckett and Myles.