Kahla shook her head and looked as if she were about to throw up. I felt sorry for her and bad that we’d argued. It felt silly now, especially because I couldn’t have explained to anyone why we’d fallen out over a… well, a few stupid words, and I’m not sure Kahla could either. There were a lot of things in Kahla’s life she hadn’t told me much about, the most important being her mother. She had disappeared, that was all I knew, and no one seemed to know much else, and no one ever really talked about it. It meant that with Kahla, there were always shadows moving under the surface, somehow, and every once in a while I bumped up against all that hidden stuff, and Kahla’s eyes would go dark and cold, like she couldn’t help herself.
They weren’t dark or cold now, just frightened.
“Is it dangerous?” I asked Aunt Isa.
“No, not normally.” She placed her hand on Kahla’s forehead. “You do feel a bit hot,” she went on. “Let me sing some wildsong… eh, I mean, just let me, erm…”
Mum and Dad were watching. Kahla came to Aunt Isa’s rescue.
“My dad can look after me,” she said. “But I’d like to go home now.”
Master Millaconda nodded.
“We do have quite a few leeches at home,” he said. “They bite from time to time, but a thorough clean and a bit of rest tend to take care of it. Come on, Princess. We’ll be home in a jiffy, I promise you. Can you put any weight on your foot?”
Kahla could.
“Goodbye,” I said, and gave her a quick hug so she would know I wasn’t angry any more. “Thank you for coming.”
“Thank you for inviting us,” she said, and the darkness and the anger were gone as if they were never even there.
We’d hardly returned to the living room before Bumble jumped up and started barking. Not his big, scary go-away-or-I’ll-tell-my-mum bark, which he used when he believed we were about to be invaded by something unwanted; this was three happy yelps and a lot of tail wagging. A friend was coming.
“It’s probably Shanaia,” Aunt Isa said. “Better late than never!” She went to open the door, and Bumble bounced and danced for joy as he tried to squeeze his way past her.
But it wasn’t Shanaia.
“Malkin!”
“Hello, Isa.”
“What a surprise…”
“A surprise? Surely tonight’s the night young Miss Clara turns thirteen?”
“Yes, but… Why don’t you come inside? Clara’s parents are here, as is her friend Oscar.”
“How nice,” Mr Malkin said.
“Who is that?” Oscar whispered across the coffee table so loudly I was sure he could be heard all the way out in the hall where Mr Malkin was taking off his hat and coat.
“Mr Malkin helped me when…” I searched frantically for any other explanation than “when I passed my wildwitch trial with the Raven Mothers”. “…Er, when I was ill,” I said feebly. Mr Malkin was a part of Aunt Isa’s circle of wildwitches, as were Mrs Pommerans, Shanaia and Master Millaconda. They helped each other with anything that was so difficult it required more than one wildwitch, and they met up four times a year to celebrate the festivals of the wildwitch year: Beltane, Lammas, Samhain and Yule.
Mr Malkin came into the living room, and I watched as Mum, Dad and Oscar all stared, no, it was more than that – gawped was probably the right word. Mr Malkin was a tall man with grey hair and he looked very old, but it was more likely to be the knickerbockers, the chequered golf socks, the silk waistcoat and the grey tweed jacket that made them stare so rudely, coupled with the fact that a mouselike little rodent was twitching its pink nose in his waistcoat pocket. Mr Malkin looked like an extra from Alice in Wonderland.
“Hello, Miss Clara,” he said. “And you must be Clara’s mother?” He bowed politely and held out his hand.
“Septimus Malkin,” he introduced himself. And Mum had no choice but to get up and say “Milla Ash. How nice to meet you,” although I could see she was wishing him far away from the house and far, far away from me, my dad and Oscar.
My dad, too, had got up.
“Thomas Ash Twyford,” he said. “Clara’s father.”
Oscar had eyes only for the rodent in the waistcoat pocket.
“Hi-my-name-is-Oscar,” he reeled off to get the pleasantries out of the way. “And what’s that?”
“It’s a dormouse,” Mr Malkin said. “I saved him from some crows and since then he more or less lives with me.”
“Is he your wildfriend?” Oscar asked, oblivious to my desperate headshaking.
“He’s wild and he’s a friend,” Mr Malkin said, “but not quite a wildfriend. At least not yet. He’s still a bit young, so right now he’s more in need of a foster parent.”
“We’d better watch out or the owl will get him,” Dad said with a smile.
Aunt Isa looked outraged.
“Hoot-Hoot would never even think of eating friends of the house,” she said.
“A great horned owl with manners? I must say…” Dad mumbled. “You really do have a way with animals, Isa.”
Mum’s smile was becoming increasingly rigid.
“It was very nice of you to stop by,” she said in a tone of voice which suggested that she was expecting Mr Malkin’s visit to be short.
If he heard the undertones, he appeared to ignore them.
“Oh, don’t mention it,” he said. “It’s an important day in the life of a young wildwitch. But more than that, an important night!”
“Night?” my dad said. “Why?”
Aunt Isa was waving her arms frantically behind my dad’s back. My mum looked like she was going to be sick. Mr Malkin carried on, oblivious to them both.
“It’s her Tridecimal Night, after all. It determines in so many ways the kind of wildwitch life she’ll—”
“Malkin!” Aunt Isa interrupted him. “I’m so glad you’re here. Because there was something I wanted to show you… outside.”
Finally it began to dawn on Mr Malkin that something was wrong and that this party wasn’t just another of those wildwitch get-togethers where it was completely natural for people to have animals in their pockets and discuss witchcraft as if talking about the weather.
He got up, although he had just sat down. But before he left, he stuck his hand into the pocket of his jacket – not the waistcoat, where the dormouse was still snuggled up – and took out a small object that he gave to me.
“Happy birthday,” he said.
It was a small, yellowish-white disc with delicate carvings – a wheel with a hub at the centre and four spokes that divided the wheel into four quarters. It was carved from bone, I thought. A thin, round leather strap went through the hole so that I could wear it around my neck.
“You know that Isa, Agatha Pommerans, Shanaia, Master Millaconda and myself are great friends,” Mr Malkin explained.
I nodded.
“In fact,” he went on, “we’re each other’s witchbrothers and sisters. We form our own little witchwheel, north-south-east-west with Isa as the hub in the middle. Together we can do more than we can on our own, and we can also call on each other, should we need help – even adult wildwitches need help every now and then.”
He smiled as he said it, and yet I couldn’t help shivering at the thought that there were dangers in the wildworld so great that it needed five fully grown wildwitches to take them on.
His long, slightly crooked fingers touched mine for a brief moment and a warm wave spread through my hand and up my forearm. I knew they weren’t empty words – he’d given me another gift, one that couldn’t be seen, but could easily be felt: a kind of blessing, I guess you’d call it. Sometimes the good wishes of a wildwitch have special powers.
“Until you find your own witchbrothers and sisters,” he said, “then you may call on us. Not just your aunt, but on all of us. All you have to do is hold the wheel in your hand and shout: ‘Adiuvate!’ at the top of your voice. It simply means ‘come to my rescue’ in Latin.” His laughter lines deepened. “To be honest,
I think it would still work if you just screamed ‘help!’ The Latin is more of a tradition. We’ll hear you, no matter how you call.”
“That’s… really special,” I said. “Thank you so much.”
Mr Malkin just smiled, and then went outside with Aunt Isa. Mrs Pommerans also got up.
“I think it’s about time I made my way home,” she said. “Thank you for inviting me to your party, Clara. You take care now.” She gave me a quick, dry peck on the cheek, put on her raincoat and went outside. I could see all three of them out there, Aunt Isa, Mr Malkin and Mrs Pommerans, who covered her hair with her transparent plastic hood because a fine drizzle of rain had started to fall. I could see that they were discussing something, and I wished I could hear what they were saying.
Dad, too, was looking out of the window.
“Tridecimal Night?” he said. “Wildwitch life? Witchbrothers and witchsisters?”
Mum gave a light shrug.
“Some of Isa’s friends are a little… eccentric. Nature worship, Wicca and so on. That’s why I don’t want Clara to come out here too often.”
“That doesn’t mean they can’t be decent people,” Dad said. “He seemed like a kind and considerate man.”
“Yes, I’m sure he is. But I don’t want Clara tricked into believing all that stuff.”
“Oh, Clara is far too sensible for that,” my dad said with a smile. “After all, she’s your daughter.”
“Yes,” Mum said and smiled with relief – probably because Dad seemed to have bought the idea that Mr Malkin was just some sort of friendly hippie.
I wasn’t really listening. Through the window I could see Aunt Isa, Mrs Pommerans and Mr Malkin walk across the yard, down towards the bridge across the brook.
“He’s leaving!” I was livid. “He only just got here and now he’s gone. Mum, it’s all your fault. Why couldn’t you have been a bit nicer to him?”
Mum got up and she, too, followed the three figures with her eyes.
“I guess I could have been,” she conceded reluctantly.
Dad looked from one to the other.
“Do you know what he was talking about, that stuff about the Tridecimal Night?” he asked my mum.
“Yes,” she said, and my jaw dropped. “It’s… I mean, some people believe… people like Mr Malkin believe that on the night a young person turns thirteen, they may be visited by an animal that brings them a task. It’s a task they have to solve in order to grow up.”
Her face had gone white. I mean, not just pale. Chalk-white, as if there were no blood left under her skin.
“Mum…”
“You might as well know it,” she said to Dad in a very tense, flat voice. “My parents used to believe in that stuff. Isa still does.”
“But you don’t?”
“I want nothing to do with it,” she said so sharply it sounded almost like a cry.
“But, Milla… is it really that bad? So bad that you can barely stand being in the same room as your own sister? Because I can see how hard it is for you to be here.”
“You don’t know what it was like…” she burst out. “You don’t know what can happen… how badly things can go wrong… on a Tridecimal Night.”
Something dawned on me.
“You’ve done it,” I said. “You’ve had a Tridecimal Night yourself.”
“Yes,” she said. “And it was… terrible.”
“What happened?”
She shook her head.
“Clara, I know you’re fond of Aunt Isa. I know you like being here, and that you… and that you’re fond of the animals. But you need to remember that not all animals are as cute and good-natured as Star and Bumble. Some animals are dangerous. A single blow from a bear’s paw can kill you or a pack of wolves can tear you apart. Some animals are venomous. Some animals can give you diseases you can die from. Don’t you get it?”
“Milla…” my dad said, putting his hand on her arm. “You do know that’s a complete exaggeration, don’t you?”
“Is it? Is it? You wouldn’t know anything about that until you’ve seen… what I’ve seen.”
Red. Blood red. Like meat in a butcher’s shop, only it wasn’t cut up neatly with a knife, but torn to shreds by teeth and claws. It. Because it was no longer a “she”, no longer a human being, it was meat, the kind of fresh meat animals eat.
I can’t normally visualize what my mum thinks. But this time an image jumped from her to me, though it was more than just a picture: my mum could also recall the smell. Suddenly I understood why she’s never liked touching raw meat, and why we mostly ate vegetables, eggs and fish. It wasn’t just because it was healthier.
“Who was she?” I whispered.
“What are you talking about?” my dad asked.
My mum said nothing. She just sat completely rigid and still, trying to keep her memories to herself.
“We’re leaving straight after dinner,” she said. “Before it gets dark. That’s our agreement, and we’re sticking to it. Do you understand?”
I looked at her white face and nodded.
CHAPTER SIX
The Accident
My birthday dinner ended up being a damp squib because Mum kept glancing at her watch, and I had a feeling she was watching every bite we took, to try and get us to chew faster. Aunt Isa noticed it too, but she didn’t say anything. Oscar was the only one eating and chatting away, mostly about how super-cool my new StarPhone was and all the apps you could get on it, completely oblivious to the atmosphere.
“Thank you, that was a lovely meal,” Mum said as soon as the last bit of ice cream had disappeared from our bowls. “It’s been very nice, Isa, and thank you for having us. But I think we’d better get going now.”
Aunt Isa looked pointedly at Mum.
“Are you sure?” she said, and I knew perfectly well what she was really asking: are you sure Clara shouldn’t have a Tridecimal?
“Absolutely,” Mum said. “Clara, go put our bags in the car. Oscar, have you remembered all your things from upstairs?”
“Yes,” Oscar said.
“Then we’ll be off.”
The road through the forest to Aunt Isa’s house is pretty much a cart track, uneven, full of holes and crisscrossed by tree roots. You can’t drive quickly – not unless you want the bottom torn off your car. And Mum knew it. But she still said:
“Can’t we go a bit faster?”
Dad shook his head. We were driving his Volvo, not Mum’s little Kia.
“Too risky,” he said. “The road is just too bad.”
The sun had already gone down. The darkness under the spruces was deep and impenetrable, but the sky above us was still more blue than black.
Oscar had borrowed my StarPhone and was trying it out.
“There is coverage,” he said. “But it’s taking ages to download.”
I leaned back in my seat and looked out at the meadow to my left. At sunset I’d often seen deer there, and I thought I did see a ripple of movement, but it might just have been the wind ruffling last year’s tall yellow grass.
Then I heard a loud crack from the forest. I just had time to turn my head and watch it happen.
“Look out!” Mum yelled. “It’s going to fall!”
My dad hit the brakes so hard that the whole car shuddered and I was thrown forwards against my seatbelt. Right in front of our eyes a massive spruce leaned slowly further and further across the road and then suddenly came crashing down with a monstrous thud that made the earth ripple like a wave. The car skidded forwards another couple of yards, we heard the crunching of breaking branches, and then I couldn’t see anything any more because the windscreen cracked and went white and opaque. In the same second I heard a pop as both airbags in the front inflated like balloons. Dad shouted something that sounded like: “Hold on tight!” But what was there to hold onto? Then a massive jerk went through the whole car, and once again I was hurled against my seatbelt.
The engine conked out.
There
was total silence.
“Clara? Milla? Oscar? Are you OK?” Dad’s voice sounded completely calm, as if just checking how things were.
“Yes,” I squeaked.
“Yup,” Oscar said.
“Milla?”
“I’m OK,” Mum said. “I just got hit in the face by the airbag.”
I’d never been in a car crash before. When cars crashed into something on TV there would be a loud bang and then a few seconds later the petrol tank would explode. Everything would go up in flames. I’d never imagined that the people inside the car would be speaking calmly to each other, almost as if nothing had happened.
“Shouldn’t we be getting out?” I asked. “Before…” I didn’t want to say “before the fire starts”, so the word ended up hanging in the air.
“Just stay in your seats for now,” Dad said. “Take a few deep breaths to get over the shock. Nothing is going to happen.”
“Wow,” Oscar said. “We crashed into a tree!”
He sounded as if he thought it was all super-exciting.
Dad opened his door. He had to give it an extra push and the hinges squealed, but he managed to open it. He got out.
If he was allowed to get out of the car, so was I. I unclicked my seatbelt and opened my door.
“Clara,” Mum said. “First check if you’re hurt. It’s not always something you notice straight away.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
The front of the car had disappeared into the crown of the uprooted spruce. There were broken branches everywhere and a strong smell of resin and fresh wood. It was a strangely pleasant and Christmassy scent in the middle of what Dad called the “shock”.
Mum and Oscar got out as well. Mum touched her nose, but there was no blood, so it looked as if we’d all escaped from the accident unscathed.
“We have to call someone who can clear away that tree,” Mum said.
“Yes,” Dad said. “But it’s going to take time, Milla. And besides, the windscreen is a write-off. I think we have to accept that we’ll be spending another night at Isa’s.”