Yuuuuck. I rubbed my arm as if I could erase the bites. Yuck, yuck, yuck. How did I get those?
It must be Alichia. It had to be. Unless I’d been walking in my sleep and ended up in some swamp, which was highly unlikely, so it must be her doing. And I’d felt sorry for her and drunk her cocoa and let her pat my hand… Yuck.
Perhaps that explained why everything felt so leaden? The duvet, my arms, my legs?
And if she had done it, then why? I wasn’t ill. I didn’t need to be treated with leeches.
I struggled out of bed. I had to find Aunt Isa this instant. But where was her room?
I cursed Westmark for being old and big enough to offer guest rooms to a whole army. And I cursed Alichia, who’d insisted it was no trouble at all to make up beds in separate rooms. Had she done it on purpose? So that I’d been alone, and she could put her disgusting leeches on me?
I staggered across the floor to the door. I was perfectly capable of walking, I told myself. My legs might weigh more than usual, but I could do it! When I realized how dark the passage was, I decided to go back to fetch the candlestick and luckily my legs seemed to get a little more mobile with every step I took.
“Aunt Isa?” It was difficult to whisper and shout at the same time, but I didn’t want to raise my voice too much in case Alichia heard me. I didn’t fancy bumping into her right now. “Aunt Isa!”
There was no reply, neither from my aunt – nor Alichia, luckily. I tiptoed along the passage on bare feet until I reached the next room and listened by the door. I recognized the loud snoring straight away – Oscar.
I ran into his room and over to his bed. He lay flat on his back with his mouth open, sleeping just as soundly as he always did.
“Oscar!” I shook him.
“Shaummmreubjsf,” he said, or something to that effect. Whatever it was, it didn’t make any sense.
There was a mug of cocoa on his bedside table too. Unlike me, he’d drunk all of his. Now it was true that Oscar always slept as if drugged, but I was starting to get a really bad feeling about this. I grabbed his right arm and held the candle to it in order to study it more closely. No round “Y” marks. Well, that was a good start, although Oscar would probably just have thought it was “super-cool” and complain that he hadn’t been awake while it happened.
I shook him again, and he seemed to wake up a little.
“Whaawhaaassupp?” he said, which I was pretty sure meant: what’s up?
“Look,” I said, stretching out my arm. “I’ve been bitten!”
He blinked. His eyes were narrow slits, but he was awake now.
“Coooool,” he mumbled and closed his eyes again. “Good for you…”
“No. No, it really isn’t. I didn’t do it on purpose. It was Alichia. It must’ve been. She made them bite me!”
“Why-would-she-do-that?” He still sounded rather drowsy, but his eyes opened a tiny crack again.
“How would I know? She’s gross. Perhaps she just likes watching them bite people? Or maybe…” I remembered her sad look and her hand patting mine. “… Maybe she has some freaky plan to kidnap me…”
In my mind’s eye I saw a horror movie where Alichia dressed me in her dead daughter’s clothes and pretended that I was Lia. She’d called me “darling” the whole time.
“Why?” Oscar said again, more clearly this time. “I mean, why would she do that?”
“The woman’s mad. She doesn’t need a reason. And I don’t want to be here a minute longer. We need to find Aunt Isa and get out of here.”
“What about Shanaia?”
He had a point. If Alichia really was crazy, she could have done anything to Shanaia.
“OK,” I said. “Let’s start with Shanaia. At least we know where her room is.”
I thought Oscar took forever putting on his jumper and his shoes. I looked down at my own bare feet, and wondered if I should nip back and get my boots, but my body felt itchy and impatient with worry. We had to get going. Onwards – not back.
When I opened the door to Shanaia’s bedroom, we were met by an icy blast of wind that blew out my candle. The big window overlooking the sea was wide open, and rain splashed onto the floor with every new gust of wind. Shanaia was lying on her side in the old four-poster bed, and most of her bed linen had slipped down onto the wet floor.
I couldn’t relight the candle because I hadn’t been smart enough to bring the matches. But the clouds no longer covered the moon completely and the blue glow that fell through the open window was bright enough for us to see at least some of the room.
“Close the window,” I said to Oscar.
On the mantelpiece there was a lighter, one of those gas ones with an on-off button and a long tip, so you don’t burn your fingers when you try to light a fire. I used it to relight my candle.
“Shanaia,” I called out, not really thinking that she would reply. I was expecting her to be at least as hard to rouse as Oscar.
“Aunt Abbie?” she mumbled in a very frail, almost childish voice.
“It’s Clara and Oscar,” I said. Shanaia’s Aunt Abigael had been dead for years. She’d looked after Shanaia when she lost her parents, and it seemed ominous that Shanaia was calling for her aunt as if she were still alive. But then she half sat up in bed and looked at us with eyes even blacker and darker than usual.
“Clara,” she said. “Sorry. I was in the middle of a dream. It felt so real…” She sounded sad, as if waking up distressed her. “What are you doing here? I’m sorry I didn’t come to your Tridecimal, but I…” Suddenly she shook her head. “Something’s wrong with me. I feel really weird. I sleep the whole time and…”
“If you insist on sleeping with the window wide open in the middle of the storm, no wonder you get ill,” Oscar said.
“I had to open it so Kitti could get in and out. But… Kitti. Where is she? Is she outside?”
All three of us looked at the stand next to the fireplace. There was no kestrel on the perch, but there was a small, feathery body on the floor.
“Noooo!” Shanaia screamed at the top of her voice, and I knew why. My heart, too, almost stopped; it was only a few months since Shanaia had lost her old wildfriend, the ferret Elfrida, which Chimera had killed.
Shanaia jumped out of bed, wobbled and fell onto one knee, got up again, and threw herself on the floor next to the body of the kestrel. She scooped it up and held it close to her chest.
“Is she…?” I could hear that Oscar was afraid to ask the question.
But Shanaia shook her head.
“No. She’s alive. She’s asleep… but… why doesn’t she wake up? And why…?” She nodded towards the floor where Kitti had been lying.
It takes a lot for a sleeping kestrel to fall off its perch. No wonder Shanaia had thought that Kitti was dead.
Then I remembered the bowl of bloody meat scraps which Alichia had been kind enough to prepare for the kestrel. I was pretty sure kestrels didn’t drink hot chocolate.
“It’s Alichia,” I said, totally convinced now that I was right. “I think she’s drugged everyone in the house.”
“Alichia?” Shanaia was baffled. “Why on earth would she do that? She’s only come here to help…”
“That’s what you think. When did you send for her?”
“I don’t think I did. But so many animals here were bitten by leeches and it made them unwell, so I sent Kitti with a message for the Raven Mothers. Soon afterwards I was bitten myself, but fortunately Alichia turned up and was ever so helpful. She said that the Raven Mothers had sent her.”
“Thuja never said anything about that.” And she surely wouldn’t have told us that Alichia was at home if she’d known that she was with Shanaia. Thuja could have saved us the walk across the wetlands and sent us straight to Westmark instead!
Shanaia shook her head in disbelief.
“Clara, you must be mistaken. She’s been looking after me while I’ve been ill; she’s taken care of everything…”
“Yes, I’m sure she has,” I said. “She has taken care of everything so she could get everything the way she wanted.”
“But what are you accusing her of, Clara? And why?”
I couldn’t explain it so I held up my arm and showed her my bites.
“Look,” I said. “I got those while I was asleep. And I don’t suppose that leeches wander around the house on their own? As far as I know they’re better at swimming than walking.”
Shanaia studied the bites.
“OK, now that is weird,” she conceded.
“Where were you bitten?”
“On my leg.” She pulled up her pyjama bottoms and showed me her marks. “Five times, just like you.”
I stared at Shanaia’s calf. Not so much at the marks, which were dark against her pale skin, but more because…
“Shanaia. Are you getting spots?” Faint, green blotches had started to spread up and down her legs, and they reminded me of something.
“Alichia said that leech fever could result in changes to skin pigmentation…” Shanaia said.
“That’s more than changes to skin pigmentation,” I said. “And if you’re not careful, you’ll end up like Fredric!”
“Fredric?” Shanaia was struggling to catch up.
“He looks like a frog,” Oscar said. “He lives with Alichia, and he looks like a frog. Or perhaps… more like a leech…”
And to think that I’d felt sorry for Alichia for having to put up with miserable, old Fredric… no wonder he was in such a bad mood, what with his landlady turning him into a leech and all.
“But if she is to blame for the leech bites,” Oscar said, “what about Kahla and your dad? That couldn’t have been Alichia.”
I mulled it over.
“Why not?” I then said. “Just because we didn’t see her, doesn’t mean she wasn’t there.”
“Not if she was here…”
“Was she?” I asked Shanaia. “Was she with you all day yesterday and the day before?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been asleep pretty much the whole time…”
“So she could have done it,” I insisted. “She could have used the wildways. She could have crept up on Kahla, either at home or on her way to Aunt Isa. You can’t see a thing in the wildways fog. And you don’t feel leech bites until later.”
“But what about your dad?” Oscar objected. “Surely he would have seen her? She’s not exactly someone you’d miss in those clothes, and there was no wildways fog for her to hide in when he was bitten.”
Colours, my dad had said when I found him. Colours everywhere. Why is everything turning red?
“Maybe he did see her,” I said. “Maybe that explains why he was muttering about colours – he caught a glimpse of her before she… did whatever she did.” A wildwitch could do all kinds of things to an unsuspecting ordinary person like my dad. Perhaps she’d twisted his life cord. That could easily knock you unconscious; I’d seen Chimera do it once to Bumble. “Where else could those leeches have come from? Do we know anybody who farms them except her?”
“No,” Oscar conceded. “Only I still can’t see why she’d want to do it.”
“We can worry about that later,” I said. “Shanaia, can you walk? More than a few steps, I mean?”
“I guess so,” she said, although we could see she still wasn’t feeling very well. “Why?”
“Because we need to find Aunt Isa, and then we need to get out of here before this leech plague finishes us off.”
“I think you’re being overdramatic now,” Shanaia said.
“Why? You should have seen Fredric. He can’t walk any more. His skin is leech-coloured practically all over. She was supposed to help him get better, he paid her lots of money to do it, but he’s been getting steadily worse. Because good old Alichia has been ever so helpful.”
Shanaia looked at Kitti, still lying limp and drugged in her hands.
“Perhaps you’re right,” she said.
A violent gust of wind made the ceiling beams creak and groan and then we heard another bang somewhere below us. But this time it wasn’t a clap of thunder.
“That was the front door slamming,” Shanaia said. “Did no one shut it properly against the storm?”
She went over to the window and looked outside. I followed her.
A windswept figure, with petticoats, shawl and the ends of her headscarf flapping like wings in the wind, was walking along the path that led to the beach. A torch beam flitted across the trees, the path and the rocks. There was no doubt it was Alichia – but where was she going?
“She’s heading for the cave,” Aunt Isa said, without a trace of doubt in her voice.
She was already awake when we rushed in with our bites and leech stories. Her cocoa sat completely untouched on the bedside table, and she didn’t seem nearly as surprised as we’d expected.
“I had a feeling that something was wrong here,” she said. “Only I didn’t know what.”
Outside in the rain Hoot-Hoot was flying silently above Alichia’s head, and she never noticed him. But his presence explained why Aunt Isa was so sure that she knew where the leech witch was going.
“Why would she go there?” Shanaia wondered. “I don’t think there are any leeches there…”
An icy sensation started somewhere at the back of my neck and spread down my spine, and from there to my whole body.
“No,” I said. “There are no leeches. But there’s something else.”
Solid rock boiled and turned molten once more; it burst and exploded; red-hot drops of melted glass sprayed the walls of the cave in hissing cascades.
Bravita escaping from her prison.
My dream, my nightmare had returned to me in vivid detail. Every single drop of melted glass, every hiss, and in particular, the captive’s boundless, incandescent, indomitable rage. It flushed through me like a fever, and I didn’t know if what I’d seen was the past, the present or the future, I only knew that it was real. There was no way this was just a dream.
“Bravita…” I whispered. “The Bloodling, she’s waking up…”
“What are you saying?” Aunt Isa whispered, and froze.
“She’s been trapped down there,” I said in a voice that didn’t sound like mine. “For four hundred years. Under the floor of the cave, trapped in the solidified stone. Ever since she and Viridian fought, and they both lost. It’s her…” I had to pause for breath, but I was sure that I was right. “She’s the revenant. She wants to live again. And five drops of the right blood can open her prison.”
I looked down at my arm. At the five circular marks. Surely each leech could hold much more than just a single drop.
“Yours?” Aunt Isa said. “Your blood?”
I gulped, and then I nodded.
“Mine. Or rather, Viridian’s…” Somehow I must be related to Viridian, be “of her blood”, as she would probably have put it. “Why it’s mine, rather than Mum’s or yours, I don’t know. But ever since Chimera first tried getting her talons into me, this is what it’s all been about – opening Bravita Bloodling’s prison.”