42 
It was early morning when the idea occurred to her – a way to help Scoot. She felt so stupid for not thinking of it before. Without even bothering to change from her nightclothes, Ottilie pulled on her boots and hurried to find Alba.
Outside the communal springs, behind a statue of three sea eagles, Alba showed her the hidden passage that led to a dark corner of the burrows. There were no dredretches down there anymore. Not since the bone singers had revealed themselves as Whistler’s allies. Even though the guilty had fled, and those who claimed innocence were being closely monitored, the Hunt decided that keeping any dredretches within the boundary walls was too risky.
Wall watches had tripled, much to Leo’s displeasure. Huntsmen now patrolled every inch of the boundary, day and night. From the interrogations they discovered the bone singers had secret entrances to the grounds. This, the bone singers suggested, was how the wylers got in. The first, Ottilie assumed, had been guided by Whistler, perhaps with the particular purpose of wounding Gracie, preparing her for the binding. The others, Ottilie knew, Gracie herself had let in.
She still didn’t like to think about the night she had spent down in the burrows, all alone with the dredretches. But the Hunt had made things more comfortable for the bone singers, providing them with straw beds and meals twice a day.
She stepped into the flickering torchlight. There were rustlings of straw as the bone singers peeked through the bars to see who had disturbed their miserable silence. They still insisted they knew nothing of what Whistler was really up to, but Ottilie couldn’t believe it. They had been performing rituals on the bones of the dredretches, under Whistler’s instruction. How ignorant could they have been?
Ottilie and Alba hopped over a dark puddle in the centre of the floor, no doubt some foul fluid the dredretches had left behind. Peering into a cell on her left, Ottilie found Bonnie. The bone singer’s dark hair was braided neatly to one side. She supposed she didn’t have much else to occupy her hands. The straw, too, was knotted and braided into patterns here and there, or arranged into letters.
Bonnie’s pale eyebrows pressed together. ‘What are you doing down here?’ Her voice was just above a whisper.
‘I want to talk to you,’ said Ottilie.
‘We told them everything,’ Bonnie said, with a shiver.
‘The directorate doesn’t keep us in the know,’ said Ottilie. ‘Will you answer our questions?’
Bonnie shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter what you do. She’ll win. She rigged the game. As soon as the king starts playing, she’ll end it all. She’s been waiting.’
Ottilie felt Alba twitch beside her. Captain Lyre had set out for All Kings’ Hill to speak with the king in person, arranging for his armies to join them in the Narroway. They needed them, she knew that. They needed all the help they could get. But Bonnie was right – as soon as the king entered the arena, Whistler would show her true strength.
‘I know as much as you,’ said Bonnie. ‘If you think we’re lying, why bother talking to me?’
‘Because you don’t like the Withering Wood,’ said Ottilie. ‘I saw it months ago. The day the kappabak appeared. I don’t think you’re guilty. I just think you know more than you’re saying.’ She spoke quickly, eager to get to the point.
Bonnie’s shoulders settled. Ottilie must have been the first person to suggest she might be innocent. Alba moved a little closer and held out a fat pumpkin scone through the bars. Bonnie shuffled forwards and snatched it. Clearly, the two meals a day were not substantial, or at least not very enjoyable.
‘Whistler turned our friend to stone,’ said Ottilie, her lips trembling as she spoke. ‘Heartstone, that’s what she said. Do you know how to turn him back?’ Her heart beat fast, desperate for a yes.
Bonnie just shook her head, ripping the scone into small chunks and laying them out in her dress. She pressed one piece into her mouth and closed her eyes.
Ottilie swallowed the lump in her throat. ‘She said heartstone was useful to her – do you know why? What is it?’ She was desperate for anything, any scrap of information that could help Scoot.
Bonnie looked up at her, her eyes heavy. ‘Heartstone is just that – people turned to stone. I don’t know what she would need it for. Truly. She didn’t tell us her plans. And I can’t fix your friend. Only a witch could do that. I don’t – we don’t have any magic. Not really.’
Ottilie closed her eyes. The ground seemed to reach up and grip her, drawing her down. This had been her great hope, that one of these bone singers could fix Scoot.
‘Tell me about the bone singers,’ she said, fending off tears. ‘Who are you all? Where did you come from? What sort of magic do you use?’
Bonnie finished her mouthful before answering. ‘Whistler recruited us, all of us. She took me from Rupimoon Rock.’
Ottilie knew of it. It was the largest town on the north island.
‘She likes to think of herself as a saviour of unwanted children,’ said Bonnie. ‘She found me curled up with the goats one night when my father was in a rage.’
Ottilie was surprised. She had always assumed the bone singers were special somehow.
‘She said she was a mystic,’ she continued, ‘employed by the Crown, and that she would share her gifts with me – that she was building a family.’
The way Ottilie understood it, mystics were glorified priests and, like the faulty peddlers who sold potions and amulets on the side of the road to Market Town, mostly frauds.
‘Does the king do that?’ Ottilie turned to Alba. ‘Employ mystics?’
She nodded. ‘There’s always at least one royal mystic.’
‘But why are mystics trusted enough to work for the king, when everyone hates witches so much?’ said Ottilie.
‘Because the mystics don’t have any power, really,’ said Alba. ‘There weren’t even any mystics in the Usklers originally; they came with the Roving Empire. Lots of tinkerers and inventers call themselves mystics because people will pay a higher price for something that’s spell’d.
‘Some texts say that the Roving mystics were jealous of our Usklerian witches, and scared that a demonstration of real magic would expose them as fakes. They say the mystics were responsible for spreading the rumour about the sleepless ritual that led to the witch purge.’
‘The baby-eating ritual?’ Ottilie screwed up her face.
Alba nodded.
‘She used “mystic” to get people to trust her,’ said Bonnie. ‘She couldn’t very well admit to being a witch, and she never showed any of her real power in front of us, or anyone. Just small things, marking the ranking walls, reading the weather, a bit of healing …’
‘So if none of you are magical at all, what did you do, then?’ said Ottilie. ‘What were all the rituals? How did you know when we felled dredretches for the scores?’
‘She gave us all one of these …’ Bonnie crawled to the back of her cell and dug around beneath the straw pallet. Moving back into the light, she held out what looked like a sharp tooth hanging from a chain.
Ottilie recognised it. It was the same thing Gracie had shown her at Richter.
‘I took it off. I didn’t want to feel it anymore,’ said Bonnie, holding it far from her body.
‘Feel what?’ said Alba.
Ottilie stared at the tiny white shard. It wasn’t a tooth, she realised, it was a chip of bone.
‘I think it’s dredretch bone,’ said Bonnie, as if reading Ottilie’s mind. ‘She never told us, but I think we all guessed.’ Turning to Alba, she added, ‘It linked us together. All of us, with her, and we sense the dredretches – we hear it like a song … it’s hard to explain, it’s like a code that we can all understand. But it’s all Whistler, it’s all through her. None of us have any power on our own – nothing once we take these off.’ She jiggled the chain, eyeing it fearfully.
‘I was told that when you wear them, the dredretches don’t attack you,’ said Ottilie.
Bonnie shrugged. ‘She didn’t tell us that. We had a chant to keep them at bay. That’s all I knew.’ Her eyes flicked to the side. ‘We didn’t ask questions.’
Ottilie was sure she was lying about something. She remembered Bonnie and Nicolai turning in circles, chanting when dredretches attacked, months and months ago. It was all for show. It had to have been. No-one could know that Whistler was so linked with the dredretches, and that a simple shard of bone could keep them from attacking – it would have given her away, and given the Hunt the upper hand.
But she had given them the rings. Why? To even the odds? Whistler wanted the Narroway Hunt to exist. She wanted it as evidence of the king’s character, and to keep the dredretches out of the Usklers while she summoned more, built her army, experimented … and recruited. She had wanted to recruit them. In her twisted mind she had believed that when they found out the truth about their king, they would want to join her – to punish him.
Ottilie held out her hand. ‘Can I try it?’
‘Ottilie, I don’t think you should!’ Alba grabbed her sleeve.
Bonnie dropped the chain onto Ottilie’s palm. It was heavier than she expected, but there was nothing else unusual about it, until she placed it over her head. Then she heard it. The song. It was otherworldly, high and low at the same time, like a beating drum and the shrillest tin whistle. There was something wrong, a scraping and a hypnotic beat, air shrieking, but not wind – air trapped, fleeing some unnatural place. Then she felt eyes upon her: stormy, birdlike eyes.
‘Hello, hatchling,’ said a voice in her head. Whistler’s voice.
Run, Ottilie thought. It was all she could think. Run. Distantly, she felt fingernails scraping her neck. Alba ripped the chain back over her head and Ottilie gasped for air.
‘Are you all right? Ottilie? Ottilie!’
Alba’s wide, dark eyes came into focus.
‘Sorry,’ Ottilie rasped.
‘You stopped breathing!’ said Alba. She rounded on Bonnie. ‘Did you know that would happen?’
‘It takes practice,’ said Bonnie, with a shiver.
‘Can I keep it?’ said Ottilie.
‘What?’ Alba snapped her fingers in front of her face. ‘Are you hypnotised?’
‘I’m not going to put it on again, I just think it might be useful,’ she said, thinking hard. ‘And I want to show it to Maeve.’ She turned back to Bonnie. There was so much more she wanted to know. ‘Tell me about the rituals, with the bones … what were you doing?’
‘We were making sure that the dredretches didn’t rise again,’ said Bonnie blankly. ‘We had special salt and a song.’
‘But that’s not really what you were doing,’ said Alba. ‘It can’t have been.’
‘That’s what she told us.’ Bonnie’s eyes welled up, guilt washing her face.
‘You were doing the opposite, weren’t you?’ said Ottilie. ‘It wasn’t salt – it was something else. You were singing to them, making them come back?’
‘We didn’t know,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘It was Whistler, through that.’ She pointed shakily to the necklace in Alba’s hand. ‘They wouldn’t come back straight away; it took time, we never saw. I don’t know anything.’
‘You do,’ said Ottilie, growing angry. ‘What about the bone singers with bloodbeasts? What happened to the boy who was bound to a knopo?’
Bonnie seemed to slip backwards, disappearing behind blank eyes. ‘We were told that he got sick and didn’t recover. I never knew anything about the binding.’
‘I don’t believe you!’ said Ottilie. ‘How can some of you have been slipping into trances and controlling dredretches and others of you not known a thing? You live together, work together, sleep and eat together – there’s no way!’
Bonnie shuffled back, away from the light.
Ottilie clenched her hands around the bars. If Bonnie really did know something … she had either chosen not to go with Whistler or been left behind. What good would it do her to confess what she had concealed? But she could help. It was the right thing to do. Surely, she could understand that.
‘Bonnie,’ she said, trying to soften her voice. ‘The more we know about her and the bone singers, the better chance we have of defeating them. Do you know anything that could help us?’
‘He told me – Nicolai,’ Bonnie said, in barely a whisper. ‘Once it was out, just before they fled Fiory.’
Ottilie had to lean closer to hear.
‘He told me about the bound ones and the bloodbeasts,’ she breathed. ‘They have to be near death, then she weaves a link between them and a dredretch, then they become as one and the person is able to control any dredretch of that species. He, Nicolai, he is one. I don’t know what kind –’
‘Shank,’ said Ottilie.
Bonnie looked at her questioningly, pain pulling at her face.
‘He’s alive,’ said Ottilie.
‘He said the bound ones are special – her true family,’ whispered Bonnie. ‘A family found. Not a family born. He said they’ll be the leaders of the new world. Her world.’
Ottilie’s fingers turned white on the bars. Whistler’s world. A world overrun with monsters. Whistler had wanted her to be a part of it, to bind her to the kappabak. Her eyes found her left thumb, the bronze ring still wrapped around it.
‘Why did the rings change?’ she asked, unsure that she wanted the answer.
‘Because she offered everyone a chance to join her,’ said Bonnie. ‘And no-one came to her. It means … it means she’s going to punish us.’
Ottilie’s chest tightened. ‘But … mine … mine didn’t change.’
Bonnie met her gaze, her eyes widening, showing a strip of white. ‘If yours didn’t change,’ she said, ‘it means she hasn’t given up on you yet.’