I have to go now.
It was Cat’s voice in my head, but I was so soundly asleep I didn’t seem to be able to wake up properly. Besides, Cat always came and went as he pleased anyway.
“Mmmmh.”
Then my drowsy brain realized that he didn’t normally warn me before he disappeared.
“Cat?”
We’ll meet again. But not until you really need me.
“What?”
Go back to sleep. But don’t forget this.
I didn’t have much of a choice. Sleep opened up underneath me like a black hole and I fell into it.
When I woke up next morning, I was stiff and sore all over, as if someone had been pummelling me with their fists all night. Cat. Where was Cat? He’d told me he would leave unless I went to meet all the animals that were waiting for me, and I’d done it. So why had he left me anyway?
At least he’d promised to come back. I tried to be content with that.
Bumble came up and sniffed me thoroughly from head to toe, clearly of the opinion that I smelt strange but interesting. I crawled off the couch and went to persuade Aunt Isa’s somewhat temperamental water heater to give me a hot bath.
When I reappeared in the kitchen with wet hair and wearing one of the bath towels as my dressing gown, Aunt Isa was making tea. She put down the kettle and looked at me.
“So tell me,” she said.
I didn’t know where to begin.
“Mum fell asleep…” I said tentatively. “And Cat came… and… and… if I hadn’t gone with him, then…”
Aunt Isa nodded.
“I had a feeling. I wasn’t sure, but even ordinary wildfriends don’t bond so closely with humans who don’t want to be wildwitches. And if you refuse your Tridecimal…”
“Then you’ll never be a proper wildwitch,” I said quietly. “I understand that. And he would have left me. He would have abandoned me.” And not promised to come back…
“Yes,” Aunt Isa said. “He probably would have. So who was it? Was it the lynx?”
“No. Or rather, yes. The lynx was there as well. But…” How could I explain? All those beaks and wings and paws and hoofs and horns and claws and eyes, especially the eyes…
“Let me see,” Aunt Isa said, cupping my face with her hands and looking into my eyes.
… partridges, wrens, rooks, blackbirds, greylags, gulls…
… sika deer, roe deer, fallow deer, red deer, hares and pheasants, water voles, red martens…
Bison. Mice. Otters. Wolves.
The firebird.
The lynx.
Aunt Isa let go of me. She rubbed her hands against her own cheeks a few times, and for once she looked at a loss.
“Not just one animal,” she whispered. “Or one pack or one flock.”
“No.”
“But how… I mean, normally an animal wants your help. It wants something. One of its chicks might have fallen out of the nest, or its home has been destroyed and you need to help it find a new one, or it’s threatened by some illness. Once you’ve worked out what it is and solved the task, then you’ve passed your Tridecimal. Then you’re essentially a fully-fledged wildwitch, even though you might still have a lot to learn.”
I nodded. That much I’d understood.
“But how come… all those animals… how can they all have the same problem? What on earth are you supposed to help them with? I’ve never heard of a case like this before.”
I stared down at my hands. I don’t really know why, maybe I was just as confused as Aunt Isa. I thought that I ought to do something, only I didn’t know what.
“Isn’t there anyone we can ask?” I said.
“The Raven Mothers. We can always try them. Normally it’s part of the test to find out what the task is about, but… this isn’t a normal Tridecimal test. If your mum will let you, we could go to Raven Kettle today.”
“I don’t think she’ll be too happy about it,” I said. “But… Aunt Isa, she’s not in charge. That was one thing I learned last night. In order to become a good wildwitch, I have to do what I have to do. Even if my mum says no.”
Aunt Isa straightened up at that moment and the floorboards behind me creaked a little. I could pretty much guess what had happened. When I turned around, Mum was standing in the doorway. She’d heard what I’d said.
Her eyes looked darker than usual.
“Come here,” she said.
“Where are we going?”
“Out. Anywhere just as long as no one else can hear us.”
Aunt Isa raised her eyebrows, but she didn’t say anything.
“I just need to get dressed…”
“Yes. Meet me in the stable when you’re ready.”
“But… why?”
“You asked me what happened on my Tridecimal. Perhaps I should have told you yesterday, but I was hoping… anyway, I didn’t tell you. But if you want to be in charge of your own wildwitch life now… then you need to know what you’re signing up for.”
She threw a last, dark glare at Aunt Isa – I still think she felt that deep down everything was Aunt Isa’s fault – and left. A moment later the front door slammed.
“Aunt Isa?”
Aunt Isa picked up the kettle again and carefully poured boiling water into the teapot.
“Go with her,” she said. “If she really wants to tell you what happened, then you should listen to her. You’ll be the first to know the whole truth, I believe. The rest of us have had to guess.”
Star nickered at me when I opened the stable door. She probably thought I was bringing her her morning hay. I fed her a few handfuls from the floor, where she had dropped it because she likes to munch with her head over the door to her loose box. Proper breakfast would have to wait a little longer.
Mum was distractedly scratching one of the goats between its horns. It wasn’t that my mum hated animals as such, she didn’t… I’d been allowed to have riding lessons for a few years, before the riding school moved out of town and it became too much of a trek. Nor had she minded Cat moving in. Then again, it’s difficult to keep out a cat when it can just slip through doors and walls using the wildways, but even so… Oscar’s dog, Woofer, was also allowed into our flat as long as Oscar was with him.
She was scared of wild animals and most scared of those that could be dangerous, of course.
She turned around and checked with her Mum-vision that I was properly dressed – boots, warm jacket and a woollen hat for my damp hair. For a few seconds we stood there staring at each other, neither knowing where to start.
“When I was twelve, I made a deal with my best friend,” Mum suddenly began without preamble. “Her name was Lia. Her mother was also a wildwitch, but Lia wasn’t sure if she wanted to be one herself. She… she was a gentle girl, a little insecure at times, but brave in her own way. We always stuck together and so no one ever really teased us. She had brown eyes like you, but very fair hair. It was so fine and delicate and alive, her hair, it never hung straight, not even indoors, and she had to keep it out of her face with a hairband. She had a fantastic singing voice, pure and strong, the kind you just can’t help listening to, and, truth be told, I think she’d rather have been a singer than a wildwitch. I was one day older than her and when our Tridecimals were coming up, we decided to help each other. First, my night, then hers. First, my task, then hers. We both felt better about doing it that way. Together we could take on anything, or so we thought.”
She came to a halt and stayed silent for a while. Star snorted, and the goat Mum had been patting put its front feet on the top plank of the loose box’s wall and nudged her with its head. It didn’t butt her, it just nudged her. It wanted her to start scratching it again.
My mum took a deep breath.
“This is harder than I thought,” she said in a low voice.
Aunt Isa had said that Mum had never told anyone the whole story.
“I saw your lynx come back,” she then said. “A big cat also came to me on my Tridecimal. She came walking out from the wildways fog, a big, beautiful golden puma with eyes the colour of amber. I knew I was supposed to follow her and help her, and so that’s what I did, together with Lia, just as we’d agreed. We followed the puma along the wildways to a distant mountain region, I don’t know where exactly in the world. But it was desolate, rugged and hot, and the rocks were as golden as the puma, and in the sky above us there were two huge, bearded vultures circling in the updraught where the rocks made the wind rise. The mountain path was narrow and stony; you had to watch where you put your feet. The puma waited for us even though she must have thought we were terribly slow.
“We soon worked out why she needed our help. A rockfall had blocked the entrance to the puma’s cave. I could see that her mammary glands were swollen and full of milk, and we could hear her cubs crying from inside the cave. Unless we could move some, if not all, of the rocks that were blocking the entrance, she wouldn’t be able to get to them and they would die of hunger and thirst.
“To be honest it wasn’t the most difficult challenge in the world – it needed stamina and elbow grease rather than any wildwitch skills, and that was probably just as well because even then I was nothing like Isa. But we grafted and toiled, Lia and I, digging, pushing and dragging the rocks away, even though the sun had come up and burned off the morning mists. It roasted our backs and we started feeling dizzy and thirsty because neither of us had thought to bring water or food. But we got there in the end. We managed to push aside one of the big boulders and roll it down the slope, and the cubs came tumbling out, charging at their mother. She lay down on her side and let them suckle, and by then we were so thirsty that we almost envied them.
“‘Come on,’ I said to Lia. ‘Let’s head home before one of us falls over with sunstroke. Can you find the wildways here?’
“‘No,’ Lia said, glancing nervously at the puma mother. ‘I think we have to walk back to the place where we stepped out of the wildways fog.’
“But as we made our way down the mountain path, Lia tripped and fell. I don’t know if her ankle was broken or sprained, but she couldn’t put any weight on it at all. I tried carrying her, but I couldn’t. I was too tired and too thirsty, I was faint from the heat and lack of water, and the path was narrow and dangerous.
“‘It’s no use,’ Lia said. ‘We’ll both fall. You need to go get help, Milla. I’ll wait here.’”
Mum stared into the morning darkness in the stable as if she were in a totally different place, somewhere hot, dry and desolate where the stones were bare and hard.
“I left her,” she said. “I had no choice. Lia was better than me at finding her way through the wildways fog, but I went as fast as I could.”
She heaved a sigh, uneven and almost rattling.
“I wasn’t fast enough. I should never have left her. I should have dragged her with me, no matter how hard it was for both of us. But I didn’t. And when I came back with water and food and bandages and Lia’s mum… when I came back at first we couldn’t find the right place. The right path. We called out and we searched everywhere, but there was no reply. We didn’t find the place until the evening. And by then Lia was gone.”
Oh no. I didn’t want to hear any more. Because I’d already seen it, in the glimpse of the nightmare I’d shared with my mum. The blood, the torn flesh, the sharp, white bones sticking out through the redness.
“The puma…” my mum gulped and had to start over. “The puma we’d helped… whose cubs we’d saved… do you know how it thanked us? By killing her. It ate her. There was nothing but a few bits of bone and dried blood left. She was completely helpless and wouldn’t have been able to run, she couldn’t even walk. It’s easy to think that animals are cute, Clara, when you’re here with Aunt Isa helping great tits and cute baby badgers. But the wildworld isn’t like that. Now do you understand?”