LATER, ASHLEY WOULD think of her time on the side of Red Rigg Fell with Penny and remember only pieces, snapshots that almost seemed disconnected from each other. There was her arm, which had been bleeding merrily, a good chunk of flesh missing and steam rising up from it like something being cooked on the hob. The storm had lost its fury, and although the night sky was still black with clouds, only a light snow was falling. Below them was Red Rigg House, crouched at the edge of its own woods, lights burning in the windows.
They got the power back on, Ashley thought.
She and Penny began to make their way down, awkward and slow, picking carefully through snowdrifts, around boulders. Ashley left a trail of blood behind her, which turned into icy scarlet crystals almost instantly. Thankfully, they were not high up, but the going was hard nonetheless.
‘We’re going to make it,’ Ashley said, trying to make her voice firm, confident, believable. ‘Not much further now.’
Penny nodded. She did seem to believe it, and Ashley was glad.
* * *
Before they left the flanks of the fell, Ashley looked up and saw another figure half-shrouded in the thickening snow. She was small and frail, a child of ten or eleven perhaps, her shoulders covered in a thin deerskin cloak. The Heedful Ones crowded around this figure as though they were hiding her, or protecting her. The girl watched them closely with mismatched eyes, and there was an expression on her face that Ashley couldn’t read.
‘It’s you,’ Ashley whispered. ‘The one who placed the curse.’
The girl’s eyes widened, and despite the dark and the snow, Ashley saw that one was blue and one was brown. Just like her own.
‘Who am I to you?’ Ashley asked. She pointed at the Heedful Ones with her bleeding arm. ‘Who are they?’
The girl’s lips moved, her voice carried away by the wind and a vast gulf of time.
You are my blood, the girl said. And they are the shadows of everyone who came between – between me and you, a line of blood through time. A chain that connects us. They have been waiting for someone who could end the curse.
‘Is it over?’ Ashley bit down on a sob. ‘Please, is it done?’
My family gave me to the men that would kill me. But you … You brought a child out of the mountain, unharmed, said the girl in the deerskin cloak. She will live when I didn’t. The hunger can end.
The snow and wind picked up, and with that, the girl was gone.
‘What did you say?’ asked Penny. ‘Did you say something?’
‘Nothing,’ said Ashley. ‘Just keep walking.’
Not long after, Ashley and Penny made it past the tree line, where the trunks were lit with skittering beams of yellow torchlight. Aidan’s voice came through the night, hoarse with worry.
‘Ashley? Are you there? Ashley!’