Moonlight and Ashes (15 page)

He'd said Olga and I were not enemies of the empire; well, I could not speak for Olga, but I had no great love for the empire. For Ashberg and for my home, yes, but for the
Emperor and his family and the Mancers – most certainly not.

And it was much more than that. It was the Emperor's ancestor who had slaughtered my mother's kind and made the very name of moon-sister into the badge of a traitor. It was the Emperor who kept up the wicked laws that forced the survivors to hide their true selves, that had sapped my mother's strength and turned a poor old woman into a ravaged husk, that had made me into someone who could not even breathe the truth to the man she loved. No, I had not asked to be an enemy of the empire. But by my very birth I had been branded one in the eyes of the empire – the very empire Max would defend to the death – and though I loved him, I could not reveal my secret. I thought, sadly, of how he could accept illegal magic and werewolves without turning a hair – but moon-sisters? That had to be a bridge too far. And if that was so, then how could anything real exist between us? We were strangers to each other, in truth. Perhaps we only had these feelings for each other because we'd been brought together in such a strange way. It was just the lingering effect of the hazel-tree magic, I told myself. And in time, when that effect faded – what would happen? Perhaps we'd look upon one another with new eyes and not want anything to do with each other.

My gloomy thoughts were interrupted by Sister Claudia hailing us. She hurried towards us, looking anxious.

‘The priest in the village told me some worrying news,' she said without preamble. ‘The police are out in force not far from here – at the junction between the road to Marika and that to Silver Harbour. I would take you further but I am afraid that –'

‘Of course, we understand,' said Max. ‘You have done more than enough for us already. We will make our own way to the coach stop.'

‘No, no. I'm not afraid for myself but for you. You see, Father Petrus said all the main roads are crawling with police. But there's a path over there,' she said, pointing to the fields on the left. ‘That leads through the woodland to a back road which is unlikely to be watched. It will get you to Silver Harbour, too. Now hurry, for Father Petrus will be out with the ointments for the last rites any minute and I think it would be better if he didn't see you, then he can truthfully deny having done so.' Then she made the sign of the cross over us. ‘Go with God, my children, and may the angels always protect you.'

‘And you too, Sister,' we chorused.

‘And take good care of each other, especially the child.'

‘Yes, Sister, we will,' said Max, gravely, putting a hand on Tomi's shoulder. ‘You can be sure of that.'

‘Goodbye, then,' she said, and with a sad little smile and a wave, she hurried back towards the church where a figure in a black cassock was emerging, and we were left alone.

‘Sister Claudia, she speak of last rites,' hissed Olga, as we gathered up our things to leave. ‘What you hiding from me?'

‘One of the sick people died,' I said, steadily. ‘The woman beside me.'

Olga recoiled. ‘Then you might be –'

‘No, Olga,' said Max, overhearing. ‘None of those sick people had an infectious disease. Sister Claudia told me. They had serious heart problems, cancer, that sort of thing. That poor lady – she had late-stage cancer, only they didn't know quite how close to death she was.' He saw Olga's stubborn expression and snapped, ‘For heaven's sake, cancer's not contagious!'

‘I know that,' said Olga, ‘and if you –'

‘Oh, stop wasting time arguing about nothing, the pair of you,' I said, more sharply than was warranted, for I was still oppressed by my earlier thoughts. ‘We'll never get anywhere at this rate,' and without waiting
for an answer I scrambled out of the ditch and into the field.

‘Selena! Wait!' called Max, but I didn't answer. When he caught me up, he said, ‘What's the matter, Selena?'

‘Nothing, nothing at all.'

‘Something's upset you,' he persisted. ‘Please tell me.'

‘It's nothing,' I said, biting my lip. ‘Nothing that can be helped and, anyway, I don't need to tell you everything. You don't.'

He looked as though I'd slapped him.

I went on, harshly, ‘You said it wasn't to do with me, what happened to you. Then what was it?'

‘I can't tell you,' he said bleakly. ‘You must . . . you must trust me on this, please, Selena.'

My throat felt thick. I wanted more than anything to take him in my arms, to hold him close, to say that yes, of course I trusted him; yes, of course I understood, yes, of course it didn't matter, that I would follow him to the ends of the earth if that's what it took. But with the encounter with the moon-sister still fresh in my mind, and the certain knowledge of how his feelings about me would change if he knew my secret, I could not with a whole heart do what I so much longed to do. Instead, I said, tightly, ‘I didn't say I don't trust you, only that we do not . . . have to tell each other everything. And you must trust me on that too.'

He sighed and took my hand. ‘Fair enough. But you will tell me, won't you, if there is anything –
anything
– I can do?'

I swallowed. Tears pricked at my eyes. ‘Of . . . of course.'

‘Then I am glad,' he said simply, and kissed my hand. The words as much as the kiss nearly undid my resolve and
I am not sure what would have happened next if Olga and Tomi hadn't caught up with us at that very moment.

But they did, and the dangerous moment passed. Max took a complaining Tomi on his back and set off up the hill, with Olga loping on after, while I brought up the rear. We kept to the hedgerow, walking rapidly in single file up the hill towards the woodland. It was all uphill and the path, or rather the faint track, was rough with clods of dirt and I was quite out of breath by the time we finally reached the summit of the hill and plunged into the woods.

We stopped a moment then, much to Olga's impatience, to rest and have a drink of ginger beer. Unlike Max and me, she seemed as fresh as when we'd started. It must have been the werewolf blood in her.

The woods were much bigger and denser than they'd seemed from the road and at times the going was pretty tough. It was hours before we got to the other side, stopping only once, briefly, to finish the rest of the sandwiches and the ginger beer. But what we discovered when we reached the edge of the woods was that there wasn't just one road – if you could dignify the rough tracks not much better than cart-ruts as such – leading out of it, but three, and not one had a signpost.

But we had the compass Andel had given us. Neither Olga nor I was entirely sure of the direction of Silver Harbour, but Max was.

‘North,' he said. ‘We have to go north. Silver Harbour is probably no more than two or three hours' walk down the northern track,' Max said, confidently, and led the way.

The track was what my Mama used to call a rocking-horse road; it wound up and down, up and down. But at
least we didn't have to fight our way through vegetation, like we did in the woods. We passed no other traffic on foot, wheels or horseback, and the country through which we were passing soon changed from patchy woodland to scrubby heathland with precious little sign of habitation. The day stayed grim and grey without the threatened rain materialising. An hour passed. Two hours. Three hours. Four hours. And still no sign of Silver Harbour. The track was getting narrower and heading into woodland again when Olga stopped and said, firmly, ‘We go wrong way.'

‘No,' said Max, sliding Tomi off his back and pulling out the compass. ‘Look at this. See, we're still going north, heading in the right direction. We just haven't gone far enough yet.'

Olga shook her head. ‘I think you make mistake, Max. Maybe you think of direction of Silver Harbour from road where Sister Claudia leave us and not from top of hill.'

‘I most certainly did not,' he said crossly. ‘What kind of fool do you take me for?'

Olga raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

‘Look, I factored all that in when I took the compass bearing. It's north we should be going. It's just further than I thought.'

‘Very well,' I said, placatingly, ‘but if we don't get to Silver Harbour soon, we're going to have to stop for the night somewhere. It'll be dark in a couple of hours and there's no moon so we won't be able to keep going.'

‘We'll be in Silver Harbour long before nightfall,' said Max crossly, and strode off down the track with Tomi on his back. Olga and I looked at each other and shrugged. There was nothing else to do but follow him. After all, we
were hardly going to retrace our steps at this stage; the junction of the three roads lay way back in the distance, hours back, and this road had to end somewhere . . .

It did, an hour later, but not at Silver Harbour. Not in a town or village or even a hamlet, but at an isolated farm. There were a series of outbuildings clustered around a small farmhouse made of pearl-grey timber, with a sloping shingled roof pulled down around its eaves like a hat, as well as a vegetable garden and small orchard on one side, and a barn full of hay. Smoke was rising from the farmhouse chimney, but no-one was to be seen.

Max said, helplessly, ‘I don't understand how it happened. I really don't. North should definitely have led us to Silver Harbour.'

Olga and I looked at each other and said nothing. There was no need to rub it in now.

‘I'm sorry,' he went on. ‘Truly sorry. We're quite lost and it's all my fault.'

‘It's not as bad as all that,' I said. ‘We're all exhausted and we can at least get some shelter here in their barn or something. Maybe they can even sell us some food. We've still got that money Andel gave us. And they can tell us where we are, too.'

All at once Tomi, who had been standing silently looking around him, burst out with, ‘I don't like it here.'

‘What do you mean, Tomi?' Max said.

‘There is . . . a funny smell,' the boy said, uneasily.

We sniffed. I couldn't smell anything out of the ordinary, nothing one wouldn't expect. Max couldn't either, and more to the point, neither could Olga, and a werewolf's sense of smell is much more acute than a human's.

‘There is only the smell of smoke and hay and the smell of animals,' she said. Her nostrils flared, and her eyes lit up. ‘Oh, and something like stew cooking inside. All good smells. You are from city,' she added, kindly. ‘You are not used to country smells, that is all.'

‘No,' said Tomi, stubbornly, ‘There
is
a funny smell.'

‘It's that or sleep in the open, Tomi,' I said. ‘You don't want that, do you?'

He swallowed and shook his head. He didn't say anything more but kept very close to Max as we walked in through the gate and up the path that led to the house.

Max knocked on the door. No answer. He knocked again and still there was no answer. Trying the door, the handle turned easily, and we walked into a most cheerful, big room with a table laid for four, and a cookpot bubbling away on an old-fashioned wood stove, a fire burning merrily beneath it. I could feel my mouth watering and I know I wasn't the only one. Even Tomi had considerably brightened up. There was no talk of ‘funny smells' now, not surprisingly, as the smell coming from that cookpot could in no way be considered peculiar, only rich and meaty and almost unbearably appetising.

There was more food on the sideboard: bread, cheese and jam, a jug of milk and one of ginger beer. There were pictures on the walls, colourful rugs on the floor, and bedrolls and blankets were neatly stacked on a shelf along one wall. Everything spoke of a busy family life, and of ordinary activities only just interrupted; but there was nobody there, not a soul. Where were the householders?

We went to look in the outbuildings. The barn was full of hay but empty of people. In the stables, two horses and
a cow looked up from their mangers and regarded us incuriously, but there were still no people to be seen. We even looked in the henhouse, where the drowsy chickens rustled on their perches. But when we went around the back of the house, we saw a meadow sloping down to a stream. On the other side of it were fields full of some kind of late crop stretching as far as the eye could see.

Max said, with a relief we all shared, ‘Ah, that's what it must be, the men have been working in the fields and the lady of the house has gone to fetch them in for dinner.'

‘Then we'll wait inside for them to come back. I'm sure they won't mind,' I said firmly, and no-one made any protest at all, for it was getting darker and colder, and the thought of that bright, warm house was very tempting indeed.

We waited and waited. The night drew closer and closer to the windows, and still the householders did not return. All the while the warmth of the fire seeped into our tired limbs while the appetising smell of stew tortured our nostrils and made our bellies rumble.

At one point, Max said we should go and see if we could see the people coming, but when he opened the door, such a cold wind blew in, and the night was so pitch-black, that he closed it again in a hurry. Then the rain that had threatened all day began to fall, and fall with a vengeance, pounding at the shutters and the roof, while the wind howled. We sat in the cosy, warm kitchen, knowing that we could not go out again into that foul night. We all knew, by this time, that there was no family living here. The table had been laid for four
because there were four of us
. We were in an enchanted place. What we were yet to know was whether the enchantment was good or bad.

It was hard to believe in its being bad, though. Not in this cosy, warm atmosphere, with the food smelling so good. I could certainly not feel any evil intent here. But who said that evil magic must
look
evil?

Tomi's instinct as a Mancer hadn't trusted this place at first. But that instinct was trained to sniff out illegal magic, and illegal magic wasn't the same as evil magic. It could be good, like the magic of the hazel tree. Or bad, like the magic of a curse. One had to know who had made the enchantment to know for sure whether it was good or bad. I'd known the hazel-tree magic was good because it was my mother's. But I had no idea who had brought us here, for we
had
been brought here. There was no doubt of that, I thought. Max was probably right; going north
should
have brought us to Silver Harbour. And yet it had not. But how could that be?

It had been a very overcast day, I thought. Impossible to get a bearing from the sun. So Max had had to rely on the compass. The compass, which had definitely pointed north. We'd all seen it. The answer was so absurdly simple, yet so stunning a thought, that I gasped out loud.

‘The compass. It's the compass!'

‘What?' said Max.

‘We didn't go north, Max. We went . . . in some other direction. East, I think.'

‘East! But that's going inland, towards the forest lands, not towards the coast at all!'

I swallowed. ‘Yes.'

‘It's impossible,' he said, sharply. ‘I can read a compass, you know. And it was definitely pointing –'

‘North, I know. It wasn't your fault.' I took a deep breath. ‘You see, I think the compass had a spell on it.'

Olga's mouth dropped open. ‘Surely you do not say
Andel
–'

‘No, no, it wasn't Andel, of course not. It was that lady who died. She – she had it in her hand when I woke up.'

Three pairs of eyes stared at me. ‘What are you talking about?' said Max, confused.

‘You see, she was a m– that is, she was a witch,' I corrected, hastily, nobody seeming to notice my slip.

‘She
told
you that?' said Olga, warily.

‘Not in so many words, but – yes, now I come to think of it, that's what she meant.'

‘But why would she put a spell on this?' Max said, taking the compass from the bag and staring at it as though it would give him a clue.

‘She must have known that we were in trouble,' I improvised, rapidly. ‘She wanted to help us, wanted us to be safe.' With a little tremor, I remembered her last words,
Then you will be on the right path, little sister . . .
‘She must have thought Silver Harbour
wouldn't
be safe so she put a spell on the compass to bring us here instead.'

Tomi's eyes bulged. He jumped up from his chair and yelled, ‘Oh, we are doomed! We are in the house of a wicked witch and she will turn us all into frogs and I will never, ever see my home or my mother and father again!' He burst into loud, frightened sobs.

We all moved towards him, but it was Olga who reached him first. She put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Don't be afraid, little man. Don't be afraid.'

‘Don't touch me! I hate you, I hate you all! I wish I had never seen you in my whole life! Oh I don't want to be a frog; I hate frogs, I hate them, horrible, slimy things they are!' He was screaming hysterically by this time.

‘It's all right, Tomi, it's all right,' said Olga, gently, as she knelt down beside him and put an arm around him. She held him till his screams died down and his sobs quietened, till he hardly even struggled against her. Then she stroked his hair and said, firmly, ‘You will
not
be a frog, Tomi, I swear it. Not a frog, nor a toad, nor anything but Tomi, not while I am here, for no wicked witch or wizard get past werewolf, that I promise you!'

I had no idea if that was true – but she was the only one of us here who had a good deal of experience of magic, so it rang true, and it certainly helped to calm the little boy.

He looked miserable and hung his head. ‘I . . . I am so ashamed.'

‘Of what, Tomi?' whispered Olga.

‘I am a Mancer. Nothing should frighten me.'

Poor little Tomi, I thought. His world had turned upside down and he was still trying to live up to something he only half understood.

‘Listen to me, Tomi,' Max said gently. ‘A very great Mancer once said to my father that is only those without honour who claim to know neither fear nor shame.'

Tomi looked at him. ‘Is that really true?'

‘It is the absolute truth,' said Max, steadily, and as he did I saw the expression in the boy's eyes change and soften. I knew that the young man had once again found the right words to appeal to and comfort that fierce little heart.

After that, somehow, it felt all right to help ourselves to the stew and the bread and the other good things that had
been left out for us. We took the lead, and after watching us cautiously, Tomi soon joined in and ate heartily. Nothing happened to us, of course, other than our bellies becoming pleasantly full. Then we found some board games in a chest by the door and spent a pleasant hour or two playing snakes and ladders before Tomi fell asleep in a bedroll by the stove.

We talked then for quite a while about what had happened. Olga and Max asked a few questions about the dying woman, which I answered as best I could. The moon-sister hadn't said in so many words to tell no-one about Dremda and Thalia, though I knew she had chosen a moment when everyone else was asleep. Moreover, she had not trusted to persuasion only; with the compass spell, she had ensured we would have a night of respite: safe, warm and well-fed. And I was sure it had killed her. The effort of the spell must have drained the very last of her forces, so even the small time that was left to her had been cut brutally short. I owed it to her to do what I had promised. But I couldn't reveal the real reason why she'd so desperately wanted us off our course; and so I had to improvise and embroider on my theme of ‘the witch' wanting to protect us.

Fortunately enough, both Olga and Max seemed to accept this. After all, there was no real reason not to. We had indeed been lucky with the kindness of strangers so far. And a secret witch would be even more likely to want to protect fugitives from the authorities than a bargeman and a nun. We discussed why she'd brought us to this particular spot and decided that this house, with its spirit of kindly magic, must once have been hers. Why she would
leave such a welcoming place for the hospital in Tresholm, though, was a mystery; but perhaps she'd had no choice or been driven out. Or perhaps this place was not quite what it seemed. Remembering how the hazel tree's magic had faded after a few hours, I wondered if this one was similar. Was that what all moon-sister magic was like – temporary? Would we wake in the morning to find ourselves in the ruins of a broken-down, old house where the moon-sister might once have lived? Still, even if the glamour faded, we'd have had a few precious hours of comfort and safety.

‘Though we might have been taken out of our way, it was for the best,' Max said. ‘After all, we'd been told the road to Silver Harbour was being watched; so why not Silver Harbour itself? We might have been caught there.

‘What's more,' he said, cheerfully, ‘we could still get to Almain this way, overland. It's a much longer way, granted, than going by boat, and there'd be a nerve-racking bit when you crossed from Ashbergia into Faustine lands proper, for the border of Almain and the empire meet there; but it is just a far-flung area of remote villages – not any place where Mancers might be likely to lurk.'

There was just one problem: what to do with Tomi now that we couldn't leave him at Silver Harbour as planned. Of course, we'd have to let him go somewhere before we entered Almain. Quite where and when, though, we had no idea. He had to be absolutely safe where we left him and we had to be sure that he could be reunited soon with his family. There was no way now that any of us would have it otherwise. For he had stopped being ‘the Mancer brat' or even ‘the child' and had become a real person to all of us – even me. He was Tomi, our compan
ion for better or worse, and that made things both easier and harder.