“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.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Heart Blood
“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.