Aurora (4 page)

At the fire at the mouth of a cave a wolf rises up on to its hind legs and struts forward. Wing reaches out and wraps his arms around it.

Lily lets out a shuddering breath. It’s Scarwell, of course.

A patchwork of furs cover the wiry figure of the young woman. Wolf tails hang around her, knotted into her knee-length straggle of hair. With all the battle scars on her downy skin, she is well-named.

Wing plants himself between Lily and the wolves as Scarwell speaks to the animals in a low snarl. The pack quietens into unnerving stillness.

What is the power she holds over the wolves? Is Wing, Lily wonders, also captured in Scarwell’s fierce spell?

‘Mara’s pup.’ Scarwell paces around Lily, her dark eyes narrowing through locks of matted hair.’ Not brave like Mara?’

‘Well my mother’s a
legend
,’ Lily retorts, with fake bravado. ‘Just like
you
.’

Scarwell stops dead, head tilted to one side.

‘Legend?’

‘The Woman Who Turned Wolf,’ says Lily.

Scarwell has become as still as her wolves. So feral is she that Lily cannot judge her age in human time. There is a searing quality in her, a wolfish sensuality as she absorbs Lily’s presence that makes the younger girl huddle into her parka, slammed back into awkward girlhood. The jealousy that has smouldered in Lily all the long winter months when Wing is alone here in the caves with this wild young woman now flares into desperation. She is no match for Scarwell.

‘I am a story?’ Scarwell demands. ‘The forest people make
me
a story?’

‘Gorbals did,’ Lily affirms.

Scarwell smirks. Then reaches out, grabs a handful of the tawny hair that Lily likes to hide behind, and studies her young rival’s face. The wolfwoman’s lips draw back from her teeth in a silent snarl. She throws the hair back across Lily’s face like a slap and struts away. But Lily saw something in the older girl’s face that brings a sudden awareness of her own power. She sidles up close to Wing and they follow Scarwell into her cave.

It stinks.

The cave reeks of wolf and rotting flesh. The floor is littered with furs and skins and bones; some gnawed white and clean, others blackening, with shreds of flesh still stuck to them. Wing peers into a dark nook of the cave where an exhausted wolf mother is licking clean her new litter. The fond look he exchanges with Scarwell as he croons over the pups makes Lily turn away.

She yelps in fright as she finds herself face to face with a beast. It stands upright like a man. But it’s only a stuffed beast, Lily sees, long dead; yet unlike any ever hunted around Lake Longhope. There is something uncannily human about its cheeky, clever face. Lily strokes the beast’s hairy hand; he has five fingers, unwebbed, like hers.

‘What is he?’ she asks Wing.

‘Nederwuld beast.’

‘Netherworld?’

Wing crouches beside her and begins to draw in the dirt of the cave floor. Lily watches him sketch the lines of a structure as majestic as the ice cathedrals that have collapsed into Lake Longhope and remembers her people’s tales of the drowned netherworld they once fled.

‘The tower full of books? The ruined cathedral? The museum of old things?’

‘’Zeeum!’ says Wing triumphantly. ‘Beast from ’zeeum. Scar bring him on ship.’

Once again, Lily feels excluded from all that they share. The dead beast, Whig and Scarwell come from a world that for Lily is as distant and mystifying as the moon. Knowing Scarwell is watching her every move, Lily takes Wing’s hand in hers and strokes his webbed fingers.

‘And what kind of beast are
you
?’ she teases.

‘He’s
mine
,’ Scarwell hisses.

He might be yours all winter
, thinks Lily,
but he’s mine the long sun nights of summer
.

But as Scarwell moves towards her, the firelight revealing all her battle scars and bloodstains, Lily backs away, remembering last summer when she and Wing watched a pair of she-wolves tear at each other’s throats.

Scarwell and Mara
, whispered Wing.

Lily could only stare and wonder, thinking of her smiling mother now playing with the little ones, Corey and Coll, in the garden of the summer tree hut.

Scarwell’s lips draw back from small, discoloured teeth in a silent snarl. ‘Go!’

Lily edges towards the mouth of the cave. She halts and looks back at Wing as the pack outside slaver and whine, but he and Scarwell seem to be having a silent battle of wills.

‘We’re going on a – an adventure,’ Lily announces as a clumsy parting shot. ‘Tell her, Wing.’

Scarwell shoots Wing a burning look. ‘Stay here. With
me
.’

‘He’s coming with
me
,’ Lily insists. ‘To the
ocean
.’

She knows how Wing craves the sea, his first home. He tries to satisfy that craving every summer, living down by the water. But Lake Longhope is not the world’s seas.

Scarwell draws in a breath as the ocean-hunger trembles all through Wing.

‘To . . .
ocean
?’ The wolfwoman turns to Lily with a dangerous smile. ‘Lily go find father?’

Lily shrugs at the senseless comment, then hears a growl from Wing that is almost too low for human ears.

‘My father’s at home in Candlewood,’ Lily retorts, looking quizzically from one to the other.

‘Rowan?’ Scarwell’s smile is as sharp as a blade. ‘Rowan not Lily’s
father
.’

THE FOX FATHER

‘
Scar
,’ hisses Wing.

‘Of course Rowan’s my father,’ Lily insists, bewildered, but a shiver of dread runs down her spine.

‘Your
father
,’ says Scarwell, ‘is across ocean. In sky city. Your father is
Fox
.’

Her wind-scraped voice seems to reach inside Lily and rake at a long-buried hurt. Forgetting the wolves, Lily’s only thought is to get away from Scarwell and run for home. She darts for the mouth of the cave.

‘Lil! No!’

Wing catches her arm, yanking her back into his protection as the pack outside the cave rises to its feet with an unearthly noise.

‘I want to go h—’

Lily falters on the word, on the idea of home.

She presses her face into Wing, overcome by a strange, unravelling fear. He and Scarwell are muttering to each other in their wild language; a throaty wolfspeak, barely human words that Lily cannot understand. But she knows some furious pact is being made.

Scarwell strides to the entrance of her cave and lashes the pack with her voice. The wolves calm into sulky whimpers and slink away. Lily takes her chance. She breaks free from Wing’s grasp and rushes from the cave to scramble down the mountain, too desperate to escape to care about the bruising rocks. When at last she stumbles on to the boulders on the lake shore, she finds Wing is close behind. They face each other in the darkness, wrapped in clouds of steamy breath.

‘Rowan is my father,’ Lily bursts out. ‘What did Scar mean?’

Wing’s silence fills her with a churning dread. But she has to know.

‘Who – who is
Fox
?’

Wing takes her face in his hands and Lily reads in his eyes, in his touch, an answer he can’t give her in words.

ON THE HINTERLAND

Lily runs from Wing until the trees stop her, tripping her up on a knobbly root. She crashes on to the forest floor and sits up, spitting pine needles from her mouth – then is yanked to her feet by strong arms.

‘Found!’ says the familiar deep voice of Pollock, the hunter. He sniffs her hair and snorts. ‘Been with wolf-boy?’

‘So?’

‘I don’t trust him or the wolfwoman,’ Pollock growls. But his eyes twinkle at her in the light of an approaching lamp. ‘You can come bear-trapping if you need some excitement.’

The lamp makes a radiant circle in the dark forest and illuminates a worried face peering out from thick plaits of hair.

‘Lily!’ cries Molendinar. ‘Your mother’s been searching for you – we all have. Where have you been?’ She raises the lamp and groans at Lily’s defiant face. ‘Oh, let me guess. Wing is
trouble
, Lily. Best leave him to Scarwell.’ Mol shakes her head despairingly. ‘Thanks, Pollock, I’ll see her home. We’re not standing here in the freezing cold a moment longer. Back to your burrow, Lily Longhope!’

Lily plants herself in front of Molendinar.

‘Why is my name Longhope?’ she asks.

The question bursts from her, almost against her will.

‘It’s Mara’s name, of course,’ says Mol, grabbing Lily’s hand and pulling her through the trees.

‘But why don’t I have my fath—Rowan’s name?’

‘Your mother saved our people. You should be proud to have her name,’ Mol retorts.

‘But my brothers have Rowan’s name,’ Lily points out.

‘You have Mara’s name, they have their father’s,’ Mol says. ‘That’s fair, isn’t it?’

Lily ponders that – and sees, in the glow of the lantern, the strange glance that shoots between Mol, her mother’s friend, and Pollock the hunter, as they push through the low-hanging branches of the pines.

‘So why didn’t you give your little Broom
your
name?’ Lily persists, as they reach the clearing in the forest that is the heart of Candlewood.

Mol sets down her lamp on one of the log seats by the communal fire, struggling for an answer. The weary figures around the fire greet their arrival with relief.

‘Just like her mother,’ Mol exclaims, her patience breaking when she can’t seem to find an answer. ‘Trouble on two legs!’

The others burst out laughing.

‘Now, now,’ Ibrox chides, handing Mol their squirming baby to feed. ‘All’s safe and sound.’

‘Without Mara’s troublemaking,’ Candlewood’s story-master, Gorbals, reminds Mol in a dry voice, ‘we’d still be stuck in the netherworld.’

Some of the wild urchins once rescued from Wolf Mountain, tamer in nature now and grown, gather around Lily, drawn to the musky wolf scent on her skin, hair and clothes.

‘You saw Wing?’ Skye whispers enviously.

‘And Scarwell?’ asks Stroma, wide-eyed.

‘The wolves let you live?’ marvels Hoy.

A soulful howl resounds through the forest. The men grab flaming sticks from the fire and stride towards the trees. Mol tucks her baby into her fur parka and pushes Lily towards one of the wooden doors set in the forest floor.

‘Burrow! Now! Before the wolves have us all for supper – go!’

‘I’m gone,’ Lily says, but she lingers till the wolfsong ends. Only the urchins, who grin at Lily as they jump into their burrows, have guessed that it’s only Wing.

His goodnight call emboldens her as she lifts the door of her own earth burrow to descend into a warm fug of fire smoke and her mother’s furious blast of relief.

THE EMBERS OF THE TRUTH