Aurora (8 page)

Silence falls between them.

‘Scarwell says,’ Mara tries to steady her shaking voice, ‘that Lily has gone with Wing to find him.’

‘To find
him
? Fox?’

Rowan, stunned, reaches out to stop Mara as she pulls on her parka and slings her backpack over her shoulder.

‘I’ll go,’ he grabs her arm.
‘I’ll
find her. The children need you here, Mara.
Our
children, fast asleep in their beds, who will wake up wanting their mother.’

‘
Our
children have their father.’

‘So has Lily.’ Rowan’s ice-blue eyes burn into hers. ‘Right here.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers, but turns away.

The thought of leaving the little ones is unbearable. She hesitates for an anguished moment then stumbles up the wooden steps and pushes open the burrow door.

The wind wrenches the door from her fingers. Mara climbs up out of the burrow and the wind bangs the door shut again at her feet. She stands alone in the forest. The wind sobs through the pines and swooping owls hoot like lost souls. Everyone else in Candlewood is below ground, like all the other forest creatures. Only the lamps among the trees puncture the dense black night Even the glittering map of the stars is blanked by cloud.

Dread grips Mara as the warmth of the burrow seeps from her.

The bang of the door has woken little Coll. Rowan will try to soothe him but the toddler’s cries of
Mummy
penetrate the floor of earth between them, tugging at Mara’s insides as if he is bonded to her with invisible strings. It’s
her
arms he wants, her scent, her hair twirled around one thumb as he sucks noisily on the other. Mara’s body aches; she feels torn in two.

Rowan is right. She can’t leave.

Mara tries not to think of all the calamities that might befall Lily in this abyss of night. An owl screeches like a terrified girl and the wind-frittered tree lamps play tricks with her tear-blurred eyes, as Mara seems to see a flame of hair streaming through the forest like the fiery phantom of a fox.

WHERE THE SUN FELL TO EARTH

Her deerskin boots are a splattered mess. She’s been sick all over her own feet.

Trembling, Lily pulls a water pouch from her pocket and takes a sip only for her stomach to heave again and again, until she fears she’ll turn inside out. Head thumping, she slumps back against a rock and tries to make sense of the unfamiliar shapes of the mountains.

Where
is
she?

‘Wing,’ she whimpers.

He was with her, wasn’t he?

It’s all such a blur.

A shadow looms over her and Lily yells with fright. But it’s only Wing, looking down at her, perched on the rock above.

Lily stands up, unsteadily. The world spins.

‘Lil!’

Wing’s shout breaks into endless echoes. Lily slumps back against the rock with a gasp as she sees the plunging abyss, a few steps away.

An immense gorge lies between the mountains. Ice sparkles in its depths. Chunks as big as icebergs sit marooned like stranded ships waiting to set sail in the spring meltwater that pelts down from the mountains.

The sun balances on a peak at the faraway end of the gorge and it seems to Lily that once, in a time out of mind, the sun must have toppled from that mountain and crashed down to Earth, gouging out the wide gorge before bouncing back up into the sky, leaving this brutal wound in its wake.

‘Where are we?’ she croaks. ‘How did we get here?

Wing gives her a dry look and chucks an empty leather flask at her. Lily catches the aroma of pine resin as the flask lands in her hands and feels her stomach heave again.

Groggily, she begins to remember.

The flask of pine wine, stolen from the winter store.

The lovely, dizzy, soaring feeling as she hid deep in the trees, ignoring all the worried voices calling
Lily, where are you? Lily, come home!

She’d gulped the oily, aromatic wine until everything felt woozy. Nothing hurt, nothing mattered. Anything was possible. She might jump off Candlewood spire and land on a star, or sail to the furthest shores of Lake Longhope and explore the distant, unknown Northern reaches with the reindeer – or run away to the world’s ocean to find her real father and make everyone suffer for lying to her all her life.

The moon hung like a lamp in the sky and she’d followed it past Candlewood Spire into a landscape of giant, bleached rocks that looked as if they’d dropped from the moon. Now, here she is, among the ferocious peaks of the southern mountains, with a head like a thunderstorm.

Wing must have tracked her every staggering step.

Lily shrieks as he smashes an ice-bomb over her head. Wing jumps down beside her and scrubs her face with ice until she’s gasping, then mushes a handful down her neck for good measure. It does the trick. Her face stings but her head is clearer. Now Wing hands her his drink pouch. Lily’s stomach heaves at the scent of pine mixed with the musky wolfskin pouch. But tree bark tea is not pine wine. She sips the cold, bitter drink and feels her queasy stomach settle.

‘Come on,’ says Wing.

He hauls her to her feet then continues a precarious journey along the ridge of the gorge, deeper into the mountains, instead of heading home.

Lily’s heart bangs.

One little word. That’s all it would take. All she needs to do is cry
home
and Wing will snap out of his wolf-trance. But the word sticks in her throat and she begins to follow. And the further they go, the harder it becomes to swallow her pride and head back.

The sun falls behind the mountain as the short day ends, and the gorge deepens as it fills up with night.

There is no moon-lamp tonight, or stars. One stumble and she will hurl down into the darkness. Lily grows ever more nervous, less and less sure that Wing
would
turn back now because he’s hot on the trail of his own small self when he came through these mountains before; re-tracking with animal instinct, tasting the wind, reading rock lichen patterns as if they are signposts, becoming ever more wolfish as he retraces the steps of his old journey.

She bangs into Wing as he comes to a sudden halt. A great rubble of rocks blocks then way. With a rush of relief Lily sees that they must turn back now. Above is the sheer back of the mountain, below is the abyss. To clamber over the precarious rubble would surely risk it collapsing into the abyss, taking her and Wing down too.

There is no way to get beyond the giant landslide. They’ve reached a dead end.

‘Tuck here,’ says Wing softly. ‘Or there,’ he adds, pointing down at the dark void.

The stolen globe, then, is under the landslide or down in the abyss too. Either way, Lily sees, it is truly lost. Devastated, she kicks the rubble of rocks.

It shifts. An ominous rumble comes from the landslide and she jumps back as rocks tumble down into the darkness. Lily counts to six before she hears them crash-land in the gorge. If the rock rubble is so unstable, then the landslide must be new.

Was
this
the Earth thunder Wing heard from Candlewood Spire? The roar of rocks hurtling down into the gorge, here, as they did when they killed Tuck?

Lily shivers.

‘Let’s go home.’

At last she’s said it.

There’s no answer. Lily whirls around. She scans the rocky rubble, checks the rough path behind her.

Where’s Wing?

The faintest echo of the rocks crashing into the abyss still hangs in the night. Panic seizes Lily and she closes her mind to the horror that Wing has hurtled down with them.

But he is nowhere to be seen. Lily is alone in the dark in the place where the Earth smashed down on Tuck and the globe.

THE DOOR INTO THE MOUNTAIN

‘Lil!’

Never has Lily been so glad to hear her own name. Wing’s shout comes from the landslide. Is he under the rubble?

‘Where are you?’ she panics.

‘Here!’

Lily edges towards his voice and sees a dark gap in the rubble – a narrow doorway between the landslide and the mountain.

The vivid firestone eyes of Wing’s wolf head glisten in the darkness. The cool fire of Wing’s own eyes burn beneath.

‘Are you hurt?’ she cries.

In answer, Wing grasps her hand and pulls her into the dark mountain doorway.

‘Taste the wind,’ he urges.

Lily opens her mouth and draws in a breath, as Wing has taught her, then licks her lips.

Salt! The wind carries a taste like the air of the salt caves of Mooncrumble Mountain on the far side of their lake, yet stronger and tangier with strange, lively scents.

‘Sea!’ says Wing.

‘I can’t see
anything
!’

Then Lily understands. Blowing through the mountain is a sea wind. The wind of the world’s ocean.

Wing disappears into the darkness of the mountain. Lily must turn for home now, alone, or follow him.

She steps through the mountain doorway into darkness deeper than night. She stumbles over rubble, picks herself up and walks bang into a rock wall.

‘Wing?’

The musky scent of wolfskin cuts through her panic. She feels Wing’s cool, rough hand grasping hers.

‘We can’t walk blind into a mountain,’ she tells him. ‘I didn’t pack a torch or a tinderbox . . . nothing.’

And how stupid was that? But there
is
something: deep in the pocket of her parka and not much bigger than her hand. Lily’s fingers trace the soothingly familiar carvings of the little wooden box that once belonged to Granny Mary. It’s Mara’s precious heirloom from her drowned island home.

Storming from the burrow in a furious haze, glugging the flask of pme wine, Lily had given no thought to what she might need for a journey into the mountains – but she’d grabbed the box, with Granny Mary’s other heirloom inside; the halo that belongs to the lost globe. Her wild hopes of digging up the globe are dead now, but the halo has its own power. Lily opens the wooden box and takes out the sleek silver crescent. The heat of her hands will make it glow.

And so it does.

Lily holds up the brightening crescent and the wall of darkness retreats. She gasps as the light reveals what lies beyond the pile of rubble: a maze of tunnels, endless branchings into the mountain, where aeons of ice and meltwater once wormed their way through.

Lily turns around in circles. They’d be crazy to walk into those dark tunnels. They might be lost forever.

A fiery eye winks from a small crevice. Lily freezes with fright What unknown creatures lurk deep inside the mountains? The halo reveals another, past the rubble, deep in one of the tunnels. And there’s another, and yet more, all glinting at her from the rocks. Ah, but she knows what it is! It’s a firestone trail, just like the one that marks pathways through Candlewood’s trees.

Lily feels a surge of emotion as she sees the evidence of a petrifying journey that until now, for her, has only been a story a cosy fireside tale.
This
was the way her people once came from the world beyond, marking their steps as they went. When they came through this mountain Mara was barely older than she, Lily, is now – fleeing into the unknown with a baby growing inside her.