38 
Ottilie and Leo had a plan. Word from the west was that Gracie and Whistler were both in the Richter zone. Ottilie had no doubt that they had left Ned and Bill well-guarded, but it was now or never.
Keeping their distance from the horses, the wingerslinks and their flyers lined up facing the boundary wall. Wrangler Morse raised an orange flag and one by one they shot out over the wall and soared westward, to Richter’s aid.
Ottilie and Leo flew side by side. Behind them a scattering of huntsmen remained with the shepherds to guard Fiory, and she would be forever grateful to Scoot that Gully was among them.
Far below, she could see the mounts disappearing into the trees, their horses the size of mice. A little further back were carriages pulled by mountain bucks, carrying several wranglers and directors, flanked by the steadily marching footmen.
Ottilie and Leo stayed on course for as long as they could manage it, but once they reached Flaming River, Maestro and Nox swept northward.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ called Igor Thrike.
Neither responded. No-one would come after them. Everyone was needed at Richter, and if all went to plan, Ottilie and Leo would be there only a little later than the rest.
They reached the Red Canyon and dismounted on a ledge by the lightning-shaped gap.
‘Anything?’ Leo muttered to Maestro, who was sniffing the air, his tail flicking back and forth. Beside him, Nox was still, tense, ready for a fight.
Leo trailed Ottilie through the opening in the cliff. The passageway wasn’t wide enough for Maestro and Nox to follow along. She felt uneasy leaving them behind, but they didn’t have a choice. This was the only place she could think to look and there was no time to seek a wider gap.
They kept their weapons drawn, but after several twists and turns, they still hadn’t encountered anything. Finally, the tunnel opened up and Ottilie could barely believe what was in front of her. A great cavern stretched out, and built into the walls of the cave were what appeared to be the ruins of ancient buildings. Or the ruins of one great building, it was difficult to be sure. There were crumbling statues and broken archways and, over by the far wall, what looked like the skeleton of an old well. Something was slumped against it. Drawing nearer, Ottilie saw the bent shadow of a boy.
‘Ned,’ Leo breathed, and they hurried towards him.
Ned looked up very slowly. It was clear he had not been kept comfortably. One of his eyes was bruised and swollen, he had a great gash on his cheek, and Ottilie could see a string of strange, almost star-shaped burns up one of his arms.
He looked at her with unfocused eyes and something to the left of him caught her gaze. Carved into the stone was an ancient engraving of a duck. What was this place?
She looked around. There was no sign of Bill. But she spotted something else that made her blood drain all the way to her toes. High on a crumbling ledge was a bone singer.
Ottilie gasped. She knew him. She had worked with him when she was a shovelie. His name was Nicolai. Recognisable in his pale grey robes, he sat cross-legged with gleaming eyes, and beside him, as if standing guard, was a shank.
She should have known! So much had happened after Whistler’s unveiling, Ottilie hadn’t pieced it together. The bone singers were working with her! Nicolai was here guarding Ned, and the shank …
Shanks were usually small, like stretched rats covered in yellow spines. But this one was the size of a large house cat. Its scaly face was chestnut brown and its spines were like rusted blades. Ottilie knew immediately what she was seeing. The shank was another bloodbeast, and she would have bet her ring that it was bound to Nicolai.
‘The bone singers,’ she whispered.
Leo whipped around and aimed an arrow at Nicolai, but he hesitated. His uncertainty mirrored her own. That was a boy up there, a boy she knew. Leo lowered his bow.
Ottilie’s thoughts whirled. She remembered Bayo telling her a bone singer had been taken ill after she and Leo had felled the knopoes. She had never thought to find out if he recovered … but, remembering Gracie’s shriek when the white wyler had been grazed by her arrow, she suspected that if the bloodbeast died, the person bound to it died, too. The thought made her feel sick. She couldn’t for the life of her remember who had felled the biggest knopo – it could have been her or Leo.
Ottilie had so many questions. All this time Whistler and her bone singers had been pretending to help, when really … really they had been controlling the dredretches, maybe even raising them from the ground. Their rituals with bones and salt ... was it all a ruse, just for show?
That must have been how the wylers were getting in. The bone singers probably had secret doors through the boundary walls, and uncanny ways of concealing them. But was every bone singer bad? Ottilie remembered Bonnie, the bone singer who had hated the Withering Wood – surely she couldn’t be one of Whistler’s minions, could she?
Ned gripped Ottilie’s hand. She turned to him. He opened his mouth, but it took him a moment to make words. ‘Watch out,’ he croaked, staring behind them.
Ottilie whipped around. Prowling out of the shadows, from every corner of the cavern, were dredretches.
‘Trap,’ Ned muttered.
Ottilie nocked an arrow. Beside her, Leo drew his cutlass. On the ground, Ned pulled a knife from Leo’s boot.
‘Ned, where’s Bill?’ said Ottilie quickly. ‘There was another captive, did they bring him here?’
‘Took him away,’ he said. ‘Didn’t want you to get him. She knew you’d come. I think they hoped there would be more of you.’
They were surrounded. Trapped. There were wylers and lycoats, morgies and learies. Nicolai and the shank didn’t move. He was doing something in that trance and the shank was guarding him, but there was no time to dwell on murky predictions.
The lycoats pounced first. Ottilie shot one down and Leo struck out, taking another. From above, a giffersnak dropped. Ottilie and Leo scattered, and Ned managed a clumsy roll out of the way. It was chaos. In twos and threes, they attacked. Ottilie couldn’t count how many she knocked back.
Then the little ones came, scurrying down the walls and up out of cracks in the ground. The shanks led them in, controlled by Nicolai. Then came yickers, spike mites, barbed toads, and countless more that Ottilie had never seen before. They could beat back the big ones, wave after wave, but the little monsters slipped between the others, the shanks a synchronised unit under Nicolai’s control.
Ottilie spun and pierced a yicker with an arrow just a second before it landed on Ned’s face. Another yicker zoomed towards him; Ottilie aimed again and while she was distracted, a dark-scaled morgie leapt off the well, right at her head. Ottilie lunged sideways, and a searing pain sliced her ear. She reached up and felt hot blood trickle through her fingers. Dizzily, she realised the very top of her ear had been torn clean off. She swayed on her feet.
There was a screech from the tunnels beyond, a live screech, an owl’s screech.
‘What is that?’ Leo shouted above the clamour.
Soaring into the cavern came a shining black owl.
‘That’s Maeve!’ Ottilie cried, clutching her ear, trying to slow the bleeding. She couldn’t feel it – she couldn’t feel anything.
The two wingerslinks were behind Maeve. She must have found them a tunnel wide enough. The owl circled and dived, plucking a barbed toad off the ground and flinging it into the cave wall. Nox pounced on a lycoat, tearing it in two. Leo whistled and pointed – Maestro curled around Ned, shielding him from harm.
‘We have to get out of here!’ said Leo.
Blood streaming down her neck, Ottilie fought her way over to Nox and clambered onto her back. Across the cavern, Leo was pulling Ned up into Maestro’s saddle. A wyler leapt at Nox and Maeve dived again, piercing its eyes with her talons.
Ottilie turned to Nicolai and aimed an arrow. She took a breath, thinking of Bayo Amadory, and drew back the string, but something stopped her. Shifting her aim left, she focused on the bloodbeast. She still couldn’t do it.
Nox seemed to sense where Ottilie’s focus lay. The wingerslink leapt from the ground and rose, beat by beat, into the air. The bronze shank dashed to stand in front of Nicolai, its spines flaring so that it doubled in size.
Ottilie felt Nox bracing to dive, but she couldn’t let her do it. Nox had to listen to her. Tipping her toes down, she dug in hard and threw her weight back, commanding the wingerslink to stay where she was. Nox let out a roar of frustration that echoed off the cave walls. Maestro roared in response and Maeve let out a shrieking battle cry.
Ottilie’s heart raced and Nox changed direction, diving not at the bloodbeast but at the mass of dredretches that were closing in on Maestro. Swiping with her blade-like claws and gnashing her teeth, Nox sent bits of dredretch flying in all directions like leaves in the wind.
‘Maeve, show us the way out!’ called Ottilie, aiming an arrow at a learie that was zigzagging up the rock wall, preparing to pounce from above.
Maeve turned to face her and screeched. Ottilie didn’t speak bird but she knew what she meant.
‘He’s not here!’ she said. Bill. Maeve was looking for Bill.
Maeve screeched again and soared out through the tunnel. The wingerslinks bounded behind, following her around every twist and turn, finally leaping out of a wide opening in the cliff, into the air.
They settled on a shelf high above the canyon.
‘We have to take Ned to Fiory,’ said Ottilie. ‘He’s hurt.’ Her ear throbbed, and she felt unsteady in the saddle. She had never thought such a small part of her could bleed this much. Free of the danger for just a moment, Ottilie felt the shock of it: a tiny part of her had been cut away. It was just her ear, only the very tip, but it was a piece of her and it was gone.
She felt a wave of panic and reached down to grip Nox’s fur hard, fighting the urge to spiral into terror and tears. If the wingerslink was bothered by Ottilie’s firm grip, she didn’t show it. She thought she felt Nox push up against her hands, an offer of support.
There was no time to go to pieces. She took a sharp breath and released Nox’s fur. With her knife, she began to cut away a strip of her shirt to tie around her head. For now, it was the best she could do.
‘Not Fiory,’ croaked Ned. ‘They went to Richter, we have to help!’
‘You can’t help anyone like this,’ said Leo.
‘There’s no time,’ said Ned.
Leo looked westward. Ottilie couldn’t argue. He was right. They had to go.