4 
Maestro landed in the upper grounds. A bespectacled boy dashed towards them, arms waving.
‘There’s a wyler!’ Preddy cried. He clutched his ribs and panted, ‘In the fort!’
Panic gripped Ottilie like cold hands in the dark.
‘Where?’ said Leo, leaping out of the saddle and kicking her in the leg.
‘I don’t know,’ said Preddy. ‘I just got in from patrol and Wrangler Furdles said … someone’s hurt, and they’ve lost it. All of the elites on site are inside now, hunting it.’
‘What do you mean they’ve lost it?’ Leo barked.
‘Who’s hurt?’ said Ottilie. Her thoughts were leaves in a windstorm: Gully wounded, Gully dead, Alba and Skip … blood and venom and blackened fangs. How had a wyler got inside?
‘A fourth tier, they’ve taken him to the infirmary. I think he’s recovering,’ said Preddy.
She swallowed her sigh of relief and rubbed her bruised calf. Leo merely grunted and charged off towards the lights.
Her fear told her to run to her bedchamber and bolt the door, but she wouldn’t do that. She couldn’t. Skip was her first steady thought. Gully knew how to handle a dredretch, Alba had Montie, untrained but armed with the instincts of a mother. Skip had no-one.
Steeling herself, Ottilie climbed down from the saddle and drew a long knife from her boot.
‘Wrangler Morse said we’re to stay clear,’ said Preddy, staring wide-eyed at the knife. ‘The elites –’
‘Come on, Preddy.’ She grabbed his arm.
Ottilie knew she couldn’t hunt it. How could she track a wyler down the dim stone corridors with no crunching or rustling, no markings in the dirt? But Fort Fiory was full of unarmed custodians: girls that the Hunt refused to train, brought to the Narroway to serve the huntsmen and maintain the fort. Skip was a sculkie, an interior servant. Ottilie would head for their corridor, for Skip’s bedchamber.
Everywhere she looked doors were shut tight. They tiptoed down each corridor, wary of drawing the wyler to them. Now and then they crossed paths with an elite, but no-one told them to go and hide. There were no wranglers to take orders from. Ottilie guessed they were locked in their chambers, under the impression they could do a dredretch no harm; like everyone else in the Narroway, they believed only an innocent – a child – could fell the monsters. Ottilie strongly suspected that wasn’t the case. She and Alba had been reading, seeking answers, but they were yet to find any solid evidence that proved the rule of innocence true or false.
Leo was nowhere to be seen. She wondered where Gully and Scoot were. She had been so focused on her own mood that day, she didn’t know what was going on with everyone else.
‘Do you know where Gully is?’ Ottilie whispered.
‘What?’ said Preddy. He leaned down, bending almost half over to get his ear closer to her mouth.
‘Gully and Scoot, are they out or in?’
‘Gully and Ned are on a night hunt, but they might have come back if they heard the bells. I think Scoot’s in for the night.’
She didn’t know which was safer, Scoot locked in his room or Gully out in the Narroway.
‘They’re probably fine,’ Preddy murmured, more to himself, perhaps, than to Ottilie.
The silence pressed on her ears like deep water. With every step her nerves mounted and she found it a little more difficult to breathe. Fiory was supposed to be safe. There hadn’t been an incident inside the boundary walls since the yickers in Floodwood, and that had been an anomaly – that was what Captain Lyre had assured them. Dredretches never got inside.
They reached the sculkies’ corridor. Preddy was one step ahead of Ottilie when he lurched forwards and fell on his face. The crunch of his eyeglasses was like a boot to the teeth.
‘Preddy!’ Ottilie’s heart skipped. Christopher Crow had lurched just like that.
‘I’m all right,’ he muttered, scrambling sideways. ‘I tripped on something.’ His voice was thin, his eyes fixed on the obstacle.
A feeble lamp hung by the sculkies’ door, a little further down. Ottilie’s gaze settled on the ground ahead. She could see a large shape just beyond the lamplight.
‘Ahh!’ Like a startled crab, Preddy scuttled further away. He kicked out with his foot and something rolled across the floor, clinking on the stone. Ottilie blinked, her insides squirming. It was a thumb – a huntsman’s left thumb, with a flat bronze ring still clinging to the dismembered bone as if by magic.
The rings were their shields. Huntsmen still learning to ward off the dredretch sickness relied on those scraps of metal to keep their hearts beating when a dredretch was near. Her ribs pressed in. Sleeper comes for none. Those words were engraved inside all of their rings. She stared at the shiny piece of bronze to avoid seeing the truth. The sleeper had come. That ring belonged to a huntsman, and that huntsman was lying a few feet from where she crouched.
Wylers were smart. They went for the rings first. She had read that in a bestiary – or maybe Leo had told her. She couldn’t remember.
Leo. Ottilie rocked on her feet, hot panic creeping up her neck. Could this be him, bested by a wyler?
No. The elites didn’t wear their rings, didn’t need them. This was a young huntsman. A fledge or a second tier. For one terrible breath she considered it might be Gully – but she knew it wasn’t. Even from the corner of her eye she would know him.
Ottilie shook her head and forced her eyes to blink away from the severed thumb.
Preddy was leaning over the body. ‘He’s not a fledge,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t know his name.’
‘Are you all right?’ She moved over to help him up and felt, strangely, as if she couldn’t feel her legs.
‘I don’t know his name,’ Preddy repeated.
‘That’s all right, Preddy, you were at Richter most of the –’
‘Do you know his name?’ he asked, desperation in his voice.
Ottilie clenched her jaw tight and looked down at the body. ‘His name is Tommy,’ she managed to whisper. He was a second-tier flyer. She didn’t know his family name.
They weren’t safe. They had to move. Ottilie scanned the corridor, noticing only vaguely that tears wet her cheeks. There was blood, but not nearly as much as there could have been. The wyler hadn’t lingered.
‘Come on, Preddy, we have to go. We have to make sure they’re safe.’ She pulled him to his feet. Her own knees quaked, but she kept hold of his arm and they steadied each other as they walked.
When they reached the door to Skip’s bedchamber they paused, searching for any sign that the wyler was still in the vicinity. Ottilie caught Preddy’s eye. Her fingers wrapped around the latch, but before she could lift it someone behind the door screamed.
The panic was like walking headfirst into an invisible wall. Dizzied but determined, Ottilie flung the door open. At least thirteen girls were inside, pressed into two corners of the bedchamber. They were all staring at a bed by the west wall.
‘What happened?’ said Preddy, to no-one in particular.
Skip’s dark blonde head was poking up from behind Gracie Moravec. ‘It’s in here. No-one’s hurt. We saw it by that bed, we think it’s gone underneath.’ She sounded calm – focused.
Preddy looked at the bed in horror. ‘How did it ge–’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Ottilie, readying her knife.
‘One of us needs to sound the alarm,’ he said. ‘I wonder if anyone heard the scream.’
Ottilie wasn’t thinking straight. ‘You go, I’ve faced one before.’
Preddy sprinted from the room. Only when the beat of his boots had faded did it occur to her that one of the sculkies could have gone, leaving two armed huntsmen in the room instead of one. It was too late to do anything about it. They needed help, fast.
She felt someone move behind her.
‘Give me a knife,’ muttered Skip.
Ottilie passed her the one she was holding and pulled another from her belt. Skip stood beside her, knife at the ready.
What was it waiting for?
Ottilie didn’t want to do anything that might trigger its attack. She would wait there, armed, standing between the wyler and the sculkies until help arrived. Preddy would reach a watchtower soon, and he might well come across an elite on the way. She was considering checking the wyler was still under the bed, weighing up whether meeting its eye might set it off, when there was a dull thud and the chink of metal on stone.
Ottilie whipped around. There was a flash of orange, and the flick of a dark tail disappearing under a bed by the window. Someone screamed again. A girl on the edge of the group was clutching her hand, blood seeping through her knuckles, her fingers grasping the stump where her thumb should be.
Ottilie felt her own blood drain at the sight of it. She had failed. She had already failed them.
‘Get her out!’ Skip barked. ‘Get her away from it!’
There was nothing else to be done. The girl’s ring had disappeared under one of the beds with the wyler and no-one could spare their own. Ottilie considered trying to ward off the sickness, but weakening herself was too dangerous – not that she had been of any help so far.
The girl fell to her knees, retching. A girl beside her bent down to help, but she did not take a step in any direction, too scared to separate from the pack.
‘Get her out!’ Skip said, again.
The girl went limp in her friend’s arms, her pale hand falling to the ground like a lifeless squid. Her friend clutched it between her own, trying to slow the bleeding. It was clear that no-one was going to move, and in a couple of minutes that girl would be dead. Skip hurried over to the injured girl.
‘Help me,’ she said to the friend, and together they hoisted the girl to her feet and half-dragged her towards the door.
Ottilie was frozen, a strange lightness in her legs and lower back. She felt disconnected, unstable. How was she going to help them?
‘Are you going to do something?’ spat Maeve Moth. Her dark hair was loose and hung like a mourning veil, casting shadows on her face. From behind the thick strands Ottilie could see her bright eyes blazing.
‘If I attack it, it’ll start attacking you,’ said Ottilie.
‘It’s already attacking us!’ said Maeve.
Ottilie stared at the red pool on the ground and her fingers shook on the hilt of her knife.
Maeve growled in frustration. ‘Kill it before it does that again!’ She gestured wildly to the blood on the floor.
Ottilie did not move. Was she right to wait for help? Or was she just too scared to face it?
Something changed in the atmosphere. It was soft, but she could hear them coming, footsteps running in their direction. Help was on its way. The only problem was the wyler clearly sensed it too. Like a flaming arrow it shot out from under the bed, scattering the sculkies in all directions.
It was chaos. Some of them made it out of the room, knocking others to the floor as they stampeded. Maeve pulled the cutlass from the sheath across Ottilie’s back and stood beside her just as Skip had done.
‘Get onto the beds!’ said Ottilie, trying to raise her voice above the clamour. She wanted a clear view of the floor.
As they shifted, Ottilie saw a shape slumped against the back wall. Mousy hair covered the girl’s face, falling across her chest, where it mingled with blood and clumped together like marsh weed down the front of her nightdress.
Now she had really failed. Ottilie was there, in the room, and she had done nothing. But she couldn’t think about that. She had to focus.
She saw a shadow shift to her left. Ottilie spun and dived, but the wyler was too quick. She glimpsed it skittering to the left and, anticipating its intention, she threw herself in front of Maeve, who had not jumped onto a bed.
Ottilie kicked out. Her boot met its horned skull and she grunted in pain as the wyler was thrown across the room. Dizzied by the kick, it slowed. Ignoring her throbbing foot, she nocked an arrow and fired, just a second too slow. The arrow hit the wall as the wyler shot under another bed.
The sculkies on top of that bed leapt onto another. They had gone silent.
Ottilie waved Maeve forwards and together they tipped the bed, shoving it to the side. The wyler shot out and pounced like a cat, scattering the sculkies on a nearby bed. Ottilie threw her bow to the side. It was too dangerous to be firing arrows with so many bodies everywhere.
The footsteps thundered. Igor Thrike raced into the room, followed by Bacon Skitter and Preddy. Bacon went straight for the wyler, which was perched on the bedframe. The wyler leapt at his face. Bacon ducked, creating a springboard for the wyler to leap across the room. Igor swung out with his hammer. He clipped it, managing to knock it off-course. The wyler rolled and righted itself. Ottilie slashed her knife, blade meeting flesh, but not deep enough. For a second the wyler disappeared. The room froze.
Maeve’s low voice broke the silence. ‘Gracie!’
The sculkies parted. Gracie Moravec was staring down at her forearm, a look of vague interest in her strange pale eyes, as ribbons of blood slithered from the teeth marks in her arm and dribbled onto the floor.
The wyler pounced at Maeve. It was slower now, leaking black blood across the room from where Ottilie’s knife had slit its skin. Preddy dived in front of her, his cutlass slashing. There was a hiss and a thud and the wyler’s horned head rolled across the floor to land at Gracie’s feet. It remained whole for a moment before the flesh melted away, leaving only sticky bone and clumps of matted orange fur, which dulled to brown, then grey, then shrivelled to crispy black before their eyes.