“Thousands of animals…” Thuja said. “I’ve never heard of that before…”
She’d invited us into her sitting room, one of the many cave-like rooms and guest quarters dug into the circular crater wall of Raven Kettle. It was a bit dark because there was only one window in the whole of her house, but that didn’t matter to Thuja. She had been born completely blind…
When I first met her, I’d never have guessed. Thuja had led the circle of Raven Mothers and I knew her better than the others because she’d looked after us the first time I visited Raven Kettle. Back then she’d moved just like a seeing person, no fumbling, no hesitation. But only because she had borrowed the eyes of her raven.
That raven was dead now, killed by Chimera, like most of the Raven Mothers’ other birds. For the first time in her adult life, Thuja was blind again, and it would take time before a raven chick from this spring’s new brood had grown big enough to assist her. Thuja could see by using other animals as hosts, but what she got to see was entirely random – and not much use if you were looking for the teapot, say.
So now Thuja had a boy who helped her out. Arkus was short and skinny with dark hair, and he was terribly shy. He hardly dared look at us, especially not at Aunt Isa. But he made us tea and ran off to fetch buns from Raven Kettle’s own bakery.
“Arkus is a kind of foundling,” Thuja explained. “He was taken from his mum and put into a home because he made the mistake of telling people he could talk to animals. But he ran away from what was by all accounts a pretty awful place and made his own way here by asking the birds. He is a very gifted boy. He reads aloud to me, fluently, even though he’s only eight years old and hasn’t had the easiest time at school.”
“What about his mum?” Aunt Isa wanted to know. “Does she know where he is?”
“Yes. We found her. She visits him as often as she can, but she says he’s better off here, and I think she’s right. Here he can learn everything he needs to, and no one calls him psychotic because he understands what the birds are saying. If we could, we would persuade his mum to move out here too, but she says she’s not ready, not yet.”
Three of the sitting-room walls were lined from floor to ceiling with sagging bookshelves, enough to keep Arkus busy reading aloud for years. I tried imagining what it must have been like to be called crazy and put in some kind of institution because you happened to have been born with wildwitch powers. Perhaps I was lucky that my mum knew that wildwitches were real, even though she wanted nothing to do with them.
“Clara?” Thuja said.
“Yes?”
“Please may I touch your forehead?”
I’d tried this several times before so I knew why she was asking. I stood still in front of her while she rested her fingertips gently on my forehead and started humming a faint wildsong. This would allow her to see fragments of what had happened on my Tridecimal.
“Remarkable,” she said. “So many animals at once… how can they all need your help?”
“That’s exactly what we want to know,” Aunt Isa said. “I’ve never heard of a young wildwitch given so… complex a task.”
“Vitus Bluethroat was told to help a swarm of bees,” Thuja said. “In theory, he had more animals to deal with than Clara, but they all wanted the same thing. Clara, did you have any sense of what they wanted you to do?”
I pondered her question.
“They wanted me to say yes,” I then answered. “But I still don’t know what I’ve said yes to.”
“Did any animals stand out?”
“I think so because a few of them came closer to me than the others. An otter. A lynx. A bison – and a mouse.”
Thuja smiled. “Those are very different animals.”
“Yes.”
“Two predators, two herbivores. The smallest one was very small, and the biggest also very big. What could they have in common?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me neither. I want to help, but…” she sighed and looked a little frustrated. “You’re a very unusual wildwitch, Clara Ash. And you have a habit of getting mixed up in very unusual problems.”
Somehow it didn’t sound like praise.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“What for? You are what you are. And it’s not your fault that thousands of animals decided to ask for your help at once.”
We said goodbye to Thuja, and set off for the house of the leech witch. “Quite close” turned out to be about half an hour’s walk through the forest that surrounded Raven Kettle. A few black birds circled above us, but it was nothing compared to the host of ravens, crows and rooks that used to live at Raven Kettle. Their absence made me sad.
“There’s just something missing, isn’t there?” I said to Aunt Isa.
“Yes,” my aunt said. “So much has been lost. And I don’t know if we’ll ever get it back.”
Would Thuja have been able to help us more if she’d still had her raven? I didn’t know. Raven Kettle had been a place where every wildwitch could go to seek justice, a place where you could get help and advice when serious dangers threatened the wild-world. It was not like that at the moment.
“Thuja isn’t the only one who’s blind now,” I said.
Aunt Isa heaved a sigh. “No, sadly. Now we all are.”
The path was becoming wetter and more boggy, and I realized that a wildwitch interested in leeches would probably want to live near them. I was glad I was wearing boots and trousers. This wasn’t a place where you’d want to run around in shorts…
The soil was black and had an acidic, sour smell. Lurid green moss grew densely on tree trunks and fallen branches, and I could see puddles of shiny water between tufts and tussocks of tall grass. Once it was proper summer there would probably be flowers and leaves and light, but right now the colours were mostly black, brown and moss green. In some places mats of woven reeds had been put down to create at least some semblance of firm ground, but I could still hear an ominous slurping as I walked.
“There it is,” Oscar said, in among the trees. “Wow, that’s super-cool! It’s on stilts!”
I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but certainly not this: the house was painted in glossy pastel colours, primrose yellow, mint green and frosty pink; it looked more like icing on a cake than house paint. Among all the brown and black it stood out like a flashing set of traffic lights, and what with all the “icing”, I couldn’t help thinking of gingerbread houses and the sort of witch supposed to live in them… It sat in the middle of a small green island and was indeed raised a metre above the ground on fat red posts. Perhaps the island flooded sometimes? A small red bridge led across the black water and, though a gate blocked one end of the bridge, a sign read “Welcome! The door is open!” in letters so big I wondered what the point of the gate was.
There was a bell on a chain next to the gate; Aunt Isa rang it a couple of times.
“Enter!” A deep, not very feminine voice called out to us through one of the gingerbread house’s open windows. “Can’t you read?”
Aunt Isa raised an eyebrow, but she said nothing.
“She’s not very polite, is she?” Oscar whispered.
“Shh!” I hissed.
Aunt Isa opened the gate and we walked up the garden path to the pink door. We didn’t knock, we just went right in. Following the surly reaction to Aunt Isa’s ringing the bell, we thought we might as well.
The house was just as colourful on the inside. The floor was sky blue and the planks that made up the wooden walls were painted in stripes of white, pink or pale yellow, keeping up the frosted look. There was white wicker furniture boosted with plump, shiny silk cushions in flowery, checked or dotted patterns, and a cluster of coloured glass tea-light lanterns hung from the ceiling. On the walls were pictures of puppies and kittens in completely unrealistic colours, and on a shelf between two candles was a heart-shaped silver picture frame holding a photograph of a little girl with blonde pigtails, huge pink bows and big, somewhat shy, brown eyes. There wasn’t a single leech in sight, but next to one of the two coffee tables in the living room there was a… eh, well…
A frogman,was the word that sprang to mind. He didn’t have a single hair on his head, his eyes stood out so much they didn’t look quite human, and his mouth was a wide lipless gash that took up the whole of his lower face. His skin was glossy and smooth, almost the colour of pickled green olives, apart from a few brown spots spreading like big freckles up his neck and across his bald pate. If a princess had tried kissing this frog, she must have given up too soon, because there was still a long way to go before he could be described as a prince. His neat black suit and worn grey bow tie discreetly contrasted with the explosion of colour around him, and I had the distinct impression that he hadn’t been in charge of the décor.
It soon became clear why he was crotchety. He was sitting in an old-fashioned wicker wheelchair with a tall back, and his legs were covered by a greyand-white checked rug. He clearly couldn’t just jump up and open doors and garden gates for random visitors.
“What do you want?” he demanded. “Alichia isn’t here.”
His eyes were the most attractive feature about him, I thought. Golden-brown and strangely warm in the middle of his sour and un approachable face.
“Oh, what a shame,” Aunt Isa said. “We’ve brought her a leech that we hoped she could identify. We’ve never seen its kind before. My name is Isa Ash, and this is my niece, Clara and her friend Oscar.”
“Aha,” he said, then added reluctantly, “My name is Fredric. I’m Alichia’s lodger.”
“Do you know when she’ll be back?” I asked.
“No idea; whenever it suits the lady to turn up,” he said. “She’s been gone for days now, and I haven’t had so much as a message or an apology.”
A half-finished game of patience was lying on the table in front of him. Probably neither his first nor his last; the playing cards looked worn and dogeared.
“Have you lived here long?” Oscar asked.
Fredric scowled at him. “And how is that any of your business, young man?”
“Er… I don’t suppose it is. I was just asking.”
The wide mouth was a long, flat line without a hint of a smile.
“For ever. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseam. That means until it makes you sick, young man. I’d throw up if I could.”
Aunt Isa studied him for a little while.
“Excuse me,” she said. “But I can see that you’re unwell. Would you mind if I tried helping you?”
He looked up at her angrily. “I’m not some injured little animal for you to fuss over, lady.”
“No. But seeing as you’re Alichia’s lodger, you probably know that wildwitches can help people sometimes.”
“That’s exactly what Madam Alichia claimed and the reason I’ve paid a small fortune to live in this vulgar confection of a house. But so far there has been little improvement. And the side-effects are bizarre. Well, if there’s nothing else, then…” He pointed to his game of patience. “I was in the middle of something.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“I’m not her private secretary.” He made a point of turning over a card from the pile, peering at it and putting it into another pile. As far as I could see, the chances of his game coming out were small.
“Well, then we’re sorry for disturbing you.”
We’d almost left when he decided to be helpful after all.
“Westmark,” he said. “She thinks I don’t know, but I saw her peer at the wildways maps. That woman is the least discreet creature I’ve ever met…” He aimed a long, greenish forefinger at a pile of papers on the second table. I couldn’t help sneaking a peek, though really that was just another form of snooping. And quite right. At the top of the pile was a map of some of the wildways, and there was a big circle around the name Westmark. Shanaia’s home. What was the leech witch doing there, I wondered? And might that explain why Shanaia had failed to turn up for my birthday?