“We won’t make it,” Shanaia panted. “I’m too slow!”
Shanaia was wheezing badly, and it was obvious that she couldn’t move faster than she already was. The wind lashed the rain into our faces, and all four of us were soaked to the skin in a matter of minutes.
“Even if we left you behind, we still wouldn’t make it,” Aunt Isa said. She had to shout to make herself heard over the storm that was shaking the trees and making them creak. “Not like this. She’s too far ahead of us. We’ll have to cheat. So – take each other’s hands and hold on tight.”
I grabbed Oscar’s hand and he took Shanaia’s.
“The wildways?” he shouted to me.
I nodded. There was no gradual transition, no gentle wildsong or humming. Aunt Isa expelled an operatic scream, so piercing, violent and powerful it hurt my eardrums and my wildsense. With a sudden jolt we found ourselves in the middle of the wildways fog.
With another jolt just as sudden, the others disappeared from me.
A violent pain shot up my right arm as if the five leech bites were five, red-hot demon fingers. Oscar’s hand was torn from my grasp, I couldn’t hold on.
The noise of the storm faded away. It was silent here. It was grey, foggy and desolate. And I was alone.
I felt a panicky pounding in my chest. Possibly my heart.
Alone on the wildways. That could kill you. Especially when you were a thirteen-year-old, almost untrained wildwitch who still couldn’t find her own way around. Even Kahla had her dad to take her to and from Aunt Isa’s house every day for her lessons.
I’d been here once before. And if Cat hadn’t found me, it would probably have cost me my life.
Cat. I’ll see you again. But not until you really need me.
Surely that time was now?
“Cat!”
The fog simply swallowed my voice. There was no echo, and I had a feeling that the sound travelled only a short distance.
“Cat…” I called out again. “I really, really need you…”
Nothing happened. There was no reply; I didn’t have the faintest sensation that he was out there somewhere or that he’d heard me and was on his way.
He’d promised. He’d promised to come back. I didn’t know whether to get angrier or even more scared. I have to go now, he’d said, as if deep down he didn’t want to, but he had no choice.
I couldn’t even begin to imagine that someone or something could force Cat to do anything he didn’t want to, but what if… what if something was controlling Cat? What if he actually wanted to help me – but couldn’t?
The damp grey cold crept slowly into my body. It filled my nose and my mouth, and it reached my bones so my skeleton felt icy under my flesh and muscles.
Then something tugged at me.
I spun around, looking about me wildly, but I was still alone. Although the touch had been noticeable and real, it hadn’t been a physical tug.
Was that Aunt Isa trying to reach me?
I closed my eyes in order to sense better. I could see my own eyelids, the fine web of veins under the skin like a red light, warmer and stronger than the desolate world of the wildways. There was something, something that could reach me, something that could show me the way. A thin, red thread through the labyrinthine fog.
I followed the thread. With my eyes still closed, I walked through the fog, and the red light grew stronger. I heard a voice, warm and loving it seemed to me, a voice that was humming and singing.
“Blood from the north, ancestral blood, those who don’t remember, yet who are…”
A drop of blood fell, dark red and viscous at the start of its fall, then thinner and brighter as gravity dragged it down.
“Blood from the south, enemy blood, she who feigns friendship, but is no one’s friend…”
Another red drop trailed through the air, and this time I thought I could almost see where it fell. It hit a rock and some damp sand at the edge of a pattern I knew well.
“Blood from the east, foreigner’s blood, he who plays the wise man, but knows little…”
Now why was I suddenly reminded of Fredric? He had nothing to do with any of this; all he did was sit in his wheelchair, hating the world. And yet the image of his surly face refused to go away.
“Blood from the west, homestead blood, she who guards here, yet is weak…”
Who guards here?
I felt something under my feet, which wasn’t fog or the wildways. Rocky ground. The cave. Westmark. I opened my eyes.
The thunder sounded muffled and remote, but the sharp white flash of lightning seared through the cracks and openings and showed me Alichia’s ample figure in the middle of the grotto, at the centre of the wheel pattern in the floor. She’d pulled up her petticoats and bunched them around her hips, and it looked as if she was wearing a pair of bloomers made from a thick, dark and strangely fraying fabric. I didn’t realize until the next flash of lightning that the fabric was alive. From ankles to groin, her legs were totally covered in leeches. Fat leeches, thin leeches, black leeches, brown leeches, striped and shiny, dark and matte, they clustered so densely I couldn’t catch a single glimpse of white-skinned flesh.
She bent down with great tenderness and picked one up.
“Come on, darling,” she whispered. “It’s your turn now.”
It released its hold obediently. Alichia hummed to it, and gently stroked the swollen rings that made up its body.
“Heart blood,” she whispered. “At the centre of the world, at the centre of the wheel, she who bound the others and was in turn bound herself. Viridian’s blood shall open that which Viridian herself once locked. Bloodling, do you hear me? It is Alichia calling you! Give me your power and grant me my revenge!”
Somewhere behind my forehead there was a red roar. My arm, the arm with the leech bites, was stinging so badly and felt so hot that I half expected to see flames. Alichia carried on, stroking the leech, and blood started dripping from its mouth…
One drop fell. And then another. And then a third and a fourth.
“Stop!” I called out, taking a few wobbly steps towards her. “Alichia, what are you doing?”
She made a half turn towards me, and she didn’t look surprised. It was as if she’d been expecting me.
“Turn and turn about,” she said with a perfectly straight face. “Your mum will feel it now. Now she too will know what it’s like to lose a daughter.”
And the fifth drop fell.
I could almost see it hover in the air. As if it fought gravity, refusing to fall. But it did fall. And it carried on falling. And it hit the stone floor, right in the hub of the wheel.
YEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeessssssssssssssssssss.......
I heard the scream even though it was silent – and I knew who’d made it. I knew that Bravita Bloodling was suspended under my feet, frozen and trapped like an insect in a piece of amber. I also knew what would happen next, it was just like my dream.
The congealed mass of rock beneath my feet split. Cracks appeared and spread across its surface. In a roar of wildpower the trapped revenant straightened her body, hunched and bowed for four hundred years, and shattered her prison into smithereens. 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.
A drop hit my shoulder and burned straight through my jumper and T-shirt. My skin burned. I could smell it. I could smell my own scorched flesh.
Something burst up through the floor. It couldn’t be a human body because its flesh and blood would have burned up exactly like my shoulder was burning now. It couldn’t be a human body, but it looked like one. She glowed red in the darkness – then white and black when a flash of lightning struck – then red again. The heat rolled towards me as if someone had opened the doors to a hundred ovens at once. At first her eyes were black, then red, then black again. Her hair wasn’t hair, but flames that flared up only to disappear and leave behind a naked scalp. She didn’t even notice that the heat made Alichia’s petticoats catch fire, she didn’t hear Alichia scream. She saw only me.
“Viridian…” she hissed between lips that couldn’t be flesh and blood, and yet looked it. “I’m taking your blood. I’m taking it now.”
I wanted to protest. I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t Viridian, that I was a thirteen-year-old girl who happened to have a few drops of Viridian’s blood inside her. But I knew she wouldn’t care. And I knew that unless I did something very soon, I would die here in the flames, and my blood would give the Bloodling the life she yearned for.
Once before I’d stood inside heartfire without burning up. Once before I’d survived trial by wildfire. My swollen eyelids couldn’t close, and perhaps it was better that I carried on seeing. But I was looking more inwards than outwards and I retrieved my memory of the firebird’s laughter from my wildwitch mind.
“Help me,” I whispered, still more inwards than outwards. “I’m Clara, and I’m calling you.”
A playful heat enveloped me and briefly pushed back the destructive, all-consuming flames. Even my shoulder stopped hurting.
Who are you? This new fire asked, but in a friendly tone of voice.
“I’m Clara. I’m a wildwitch. I speak the truth or keep silent. And I never take without giving.”
The firebird laughed. Its laughter was like a whirlwind of tiny flame feathers that spread through the cave, and where they landed, the hungry fire died down. The boiling masses of stone began to cool. The floor started to solidify.
Bravita froze too, but only for a second or so. Her gaze released mine and shifted instead to the firebird flying through the cave in a vortex of flame feathers and laughter. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was so gentle and so strong at the same time, wild but friendly, real but magical, an animal, a bird, yes, but so much more than that.
I was so busy watching its flight that I didn’t see what happened. All I saw was something dark and heavy hurtle through the air; striking the bird’s body, crushing its delicate ribs with a sudden, crisp little snap.
The firebird’s light flickered. It plunged to the ground. I reached out my hands to catch it, but the thing that landed light and warm in my palms was already dead. The flame feathers around us went out one by one like dying embers. And Bravita grew in size and wrenched first one foot, then the other free from the congealing rock.
She had thrown a stone at it. Not a curse or something violent and magical. A simple stone had killed my firebird, and all its gentle wildness had been snuffed out like a candle.
I struggled to understand it.
Struggled to understand how it could die so easily, but I found it even harder to understand why someone would want to kill it. Why someone would throw a rock at something so beautiful, and throw it hard, accurately and without mercy.
Bravita took a step towards me, and I knew what she wanted. She was the hungry one. She was the revenant. She needed life in order to live. She’d taken the life of the firebird, and now she was going to take mine – the confused life of a foolish thirteen-year-old girl.
And I didn’t see that there was any way I could stop her.