Sisters of the Fire Read online

  But his horse was unburdened and young, and he was in front of her a moment later, blocking her way. ‘You must have something,’ he said.

  ‘I have nothing.’

  ‘Empty cart? Have you just sold, or are you about to buy? Either way, you will have coins.’ He unsheathed a sword and opened her cloak with its point. ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘Please. You don’t want this. Just let us be on our way.’

  He snapped his fingers. ‘Hand it over, or I’ll kill your horse. And then I might kill you too.’

  Rose’s hands shook as she loosened the purse from her cloak, pulling the ribbon to open it. He leaned eagerly in to take it from her, but she reached in to grab a handful of powder, then threw it with all her might onto the ground in front of him. It made a thunderous cracking sound, then bright white light began to fizz up from the ground, making both the horses rear. Rose held tight to the reins. The man shrieked – an unearthly sound – and when Sunny’s hooves were on the ground again Rose urged her forwards.

  Sunny didn’t need to be prompted; she bolted, the cart bouncing and rattling so hard it shook Rose’s bones. She didn’t look back, although the man screamed at her, ‘What have you done? What have you done?’ for what seemed like a mile.

  She was desperate to be back on a road, a wide road with no bandits roaming it. But Sunny couldn’t keep up the fast pace and finally slowed to a walk. Rose continued to glance behind her, feeling exposed and cold between her shoulders. But the bandit hadn’t followed, and she had no idea how long the blindness would last.

  Then, Rose saw a tall, dark shape in the distance that might be a waymark. As they drew closer, she could see two arrows pointing off it in different directions. How had she not seen this the night before? Among flat fields, it was easily apparent.

  She gently pulled Sunny’s reins and came to a halt. She dismounted, heart quickening as she glanced behind her. But the horizon was clear.

  Rose approached the waymark. The post was hewn roughly of wood, ivy growing up it and moss colonising the damp cracks. But the arrows were blank. She rounded the waymark and looked on both sides. None of the symbols she would expect – birds, acorns, waves, leaves: the language learned by every traveller – were apparent; only, uncarved wood.

  Rose peered off into the distance. Sun flooded fields. Smoke from farmhouses. Which way?

  A shadow moved at the periphery of her vision and a chill stole over her. She turned back to see the waymark was gone, and in its place stood a man. Six feet tall, angular and bony, his hands spread in precisely the same directions as the arrows. His hair was white and fine, and stirring in the morning breeze. His beard was steely grey.

  She shrieked with fright and took a step backwards, overbalancing and landing on her backside. She scooted back from him, and he dropped his hands and laughed at her.

  ‘Why so frightened, little witch?’

  ‘I’m not a –’

  ‘I saw what you did to that bandit. Of course you are.’

  ‘Please. Don’t hurt me.’

  He offered her a hand to help her up; she eyed it warily. She noticed his long boots were wound about with ivy.

  ‘I don’t intend to hurt you,’ he said. ‘I was only curious about you, that is all. That was strong magic.’

  ‘Not my magic. My aunt made it for me.’

  ‘Your aunt?’

  ‘Yldra. We live out on the moors.’

  ‘I know of her. I meet a lot of other undermagicians on the border roads out here, making their way in and out of the world.’ He beckoned that she should give him her hand. ‘You look lost.’

  ‘I am lost.’ She took his fingers. They were impossibly soft. He pulled her to her feet with surprising strength and grace for his age, keeping her hand in his.

  ‘What is the nature of your … lostness?’ he asked, his grey gaze burrowing deep.

  She blinked rapidly. ‘I need to find Llyr’s Hollow. A man named Cardew.’

  He closed his eyes and began to hum softly. Rose watched him, all her senses alert.

  His eyes snapped open. ‘Llyr’s Hollow is west of here,’ he said, indicating the mouth of a road a hundred yards away. ‘The farms are all north of the village, so turn at the inn. You’ll know Cardew’s farm by the two houses, side by side.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But you said you were lost, and I find people who are lost.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She looked down at their interlocked hands and tried to pull away, keen to be in the cart again.

  He tightened his grip. ‘Are you still lost?’

  ‘I – no.’

  ‘Are you certain?’ His eyes were like stormclouds. She could swear she caught the scent of rain, even though the sky was clear.

  ‘I’m certain.’

  He released her hand, and Rose felt something that was almost like sadness at letting him go.

  ‘It’s not quite an hour from here,’ he said. ‘Go.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She turned and ran back to her horse and cart.

  ‘You have many more roads to travel in times ahead,’ he called after her. ‘You will be lost again.’

  She barely heard him over the sound of Sunny’s hooves.

  The twin houses were identical: lime washed, thatch roofed, morning sunlight making them glow against the pale blue sky. The door to the second one was open so Rose hurried up the hill from the road, where Sunny waited patiently.

  From the bright morning, she peered into the shadowy house. Two men – neither of them Heath. One sat at the side of a bed of straw and blankets, bright eyed and round cheeked and ginger haired. The other, lying under the blankets, was thin and sunken and –

  It was Heath. The shock kicked Rose’s heart.

  ‘Heath!’ she cried, sinking to her knees on the rushes next to him.

  He opened his eyes a crack. Sea-blue. Then they closed again, and his thin hand flopped out towards her and she caught it in her fingers. Alive, he was still alive.

  ‘You must be Rose.’ This was Cardew, the man with the bright copper hair. She recognised him instantly as Ærfolc, the race of original inhabitants of Thyrsland before her people had come across the sea many generations ago. Most of them lived on the margins of society now, hidden away near the magicians in the wilds of Bradsey. Heath was half Ærfolc on his unknown father’s side. His hair was golden, but his beard, if he grew it, was flaming red.

  ‘I am,’ she said. ‘I got your message. How long has he been like this?’

  ‘Since the start of summer. I have tried my best to tend him, but he is wasting before my eyes.’

  Rose touched Heath’s forehead, trying to match the person in the bed with the strong, hearty man she had once loved so fiercely it threatened to break her in two. ‘Can he hear me? Does he know I’m here?’ she asked.

  As if in answer, Heath gave her hand a feeble squeeze. She could see the bones of his wrist. There was no doubt that he was close to death.

  Unless …

  ‘My aunt can heal him,’ she said.

  Heath’s grip tightened.

  ‘We have tried every village witch and even a physician from the Great School.’

  ‘She’s a powerful undermagician. Look, he’s squeezing my hand. He wants it too.’

  Cardew looked sceptical. ‘Would she come here? How long would that take?’

  Rose was already shaking her head. ‘I will take him to her. Today. I have my horse here, and a cart.’

  Cardew glanced at Heath, then back to Rose. ‘Very well, but I will ride with you. There are things you should know about Heath.’

  She gazed at Heath’s face, the first silver hairs among the gold. ‘I once knew every secret of his heart,’ she said.

  ‘Many things have changed for him. Many years among the Ærfolc. He is … more important than you can imagine.’

  Rose considered Cardew by the light coming through the door. She realised he was much younger than Heath, perhaps not yet twenty, and
she wondered at their relationship, how they had come to be living here together.

  ‘I should like to know everything,’ she said. ‘Let’s not delay.’

  Five

  It was a sunny, windy day when Ash first glimpsed the sea. Wide green moors choked with gorse and bracken gave way to plunging cliffs and a rough expanse of grey-blue that slurred into the grey clouds collecting on the horizon. The blast of salt and seaweed in her nostrils was sharp and fresh. Here and there, trees twisted by the endless gusting winds bent over them. For most of the journey, she and Unweder had followed the path of a narrow river down towards the sea. Only in the last mile had they veered off to the south-west, away from distant fields and livestock that spoke of civilisation too close by for Unweder’s comfort.

  Where they stood now, the ground was rocky and salt-soaked: not appealing for a farmer.

  ‘Remote enough for you?’ Ash said, as Unweder caught up with her.

  ‘Ah, doesn’t the sea stir the soul?’ He gazed at the water for a while. Ash noticed his nose and cheeks were pink from the sun, and assumed hers would be the same. Then he turned and nodded towards the west. ‘No, not remote enough.’

  Ash turned and saw, on an exposed headland, a roof.

  ‘Who on earth would live out here?’ she asked, her words snatched away on the wind.

  ‘A trimartyr by the looks. It’s a chapel.’

  As soon as he said it, Ash recognised the distinctive triangular shape of the roof. They walked a few hundred yards closer. Yes, she could see it was built of roughly hewn stone.

  ‘Well, they really are everywhere,’ she mused. ‘If my father knew …’

  But Unweder had begun to walk briskly towards the chapel, his magpie eye having spotted something she hadn’t. She hurried to catch up to him; Unweder could be alarmingly fast when he wanted. Over rocks and bracken, striding out towards the headland with her in his wake.

  When she was about twenty yards away, she saw a pair of legs outside the chapel. Human, clearly, though not much left but bones and stringy clothes. The body lay half in and half out of the open threshold, his cloak thrown up over his head. Unweder kneeled next to him.

  ‘Has he been murdered?’ Ash asked.

  ‘There’s no sign of it. No blood. And look, nobody has taken his gold chain.’ Unweder snapped it off and held it up, the gold trimartyr symbol glinting in the sun. ‘Perhaps he died of illness, or age, or accident.’ Unweder peered into the chapel. ‘Ash, I think we’ve found a house to live in.’

  ‘We can’t live here. If it’s a chapel, trimartyrs will turn up.’

  ‘Well, none have turned up for a long time,’ Unweder said, indicating the body. ‘Perhaps he built the chapel then had no time to convert anyone. We’re in Ælmesse after all. Has your father made it illegal to be a trimartyr yet?’

  ‘He wouldn’t think to make laws to govern people’s souls.’

  Unweder turned his face up and smiled. ‘You really do idealise him, you know.’

  ‘He is my father. I am his daughter.’ Her father. She hadn’t seen him in years, and last time he’d been unconscious, in the grip of bad magic. She knew he had recovered because she heard his name from time to time if they stayed in an inn. Bluebell was not yet the king, though she would be one day.

  ‘Come on, Princess,’ Unweder said, wryly. ‘Help me with this body.’

  Ash unloaded her pack from her shoulders and ducked under the doorway. Inside, she found the trimartyr’s bed. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘We can wrap him in this. If he died of illness it might still be clinging to his bedding.’

  They tried to roll the body onto the blankets but bones dropped out of sleeves and the whole process was much more gruesome than Ash had wished for. Finally, they had the body on the blanket. Unweder strode away to stand on the edge of the headland and determine a good place to inter the trimartyr. Ash gathered up the ragged remains of his clothes, pausing momentarily when she noticed the side of the man’s cloak appeared to have been burned away. Her heart sped a little. In fact, what she had taken for black patterns all over his clothes appeared to be scorch marks. She quickly bundled it all away from Unweder’s eyes, and folded the blanket over everything tightly. Scorch marks. A dead body. She glanced at the chapel, and saw no evidence of fire here. He had run back here for shelter; something had burned him from behind.

  ‘Let’s just drop him off the cliff there,’ Unweder said, his arm extended to the south. ‘The tide will take him out.’

  Ash picked up one end of the load and Unweder the other. Together they carried it to a sheer promontory. Crouching, they positioned it ready to drop into the crashing waves below.

  ‘Should we say a trimartyr prayer?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you know one?’

  ‘I could make one up. I know all the common faith prayers.’

  ‘Go on then. If you must.’

  So she said one of the prayers she had learned back at the study halls of Thriddastowe, in what seemed like another life from the one she was leading now, and substituted trimartyr names for the Great Mother and the Horse God, and asked his god to receive him with love. Then they flung him over the cliff and the blanket half-unfolded as he spun down towards the ocean, landing with a splash that was inaudible over the sound of the wind and the sea.

  ‘We will clean the chapel out with saltwater and light a fire,’ Unweder said, already leaving the cliff’s edge. ‘Our new home. But not for long. This time, I’m sure we’ll find the dragon.’

  The same words he ever said. But Ash admitted to herself that, this time, he might be right.

  Ash woke to a mournful moaning sound. Her eyes flickered open and she took a moment to remember where she was. The stone chapel, the headland, the sea. The wind outside was immense, wuthering over the roof, rattling the shutters. She turned on her side. The moaning was coming from Unweder, who slept on the opposite side of the chapel. She flicked back her blanket and crawled across to him, shaking him gently awake.

  ‘Unweder,’ she said. ‘It’s just a dream. Wake up.’

  His eye popped open. A huge intake of breath rushed into his lungs, and Ash thought he might scream. But then he came to his senses, saw her in the dark, and offered a little smile.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Nasty dream.’

  Her scalp prickled lightly. ‘Not an omen?’

  ‘No. Too confused and labyrinthine for that. When you have lived as long as I have, in so many bodies, the dreams are different. Flashes from childhood, memories of people long in their graves. My mother.’

  Unweder had spoken rarely of his past. Though she’d presumed he must have had a childhood, as everyone did, it was still strange to hear him acknowledge it.

  A mighty gust passed over the chapel, seeming to shake the whole building.

  Unweder turned his eye up to the roof. ‘Is it any wonder I wasn’t sleeping peacefully?’ he said.

  ‘At least it’s weathertight,’ Ash said. ‘Goodnight. I wish you more peaceful dreams.’

  ‘Goodnight, Ash.’

  Ash climbed back into her bed, reflecting on Unweder’s many lives. He badly wanted a new body, but it meant murder and Ash wouldn’t have it. She’d agreed to provide the talisman so he wouldn’t kill, but it never stopped troubling her that killing was always on his mind.

  She scratched her scalp and rolled over and, as she did, noticed something hard poking her hip. She reached down to pull it out of her blankets. Although she couldn’t see it clearly in the dark, her fingertips told her it was a small seahorse, no bigger than her palm, and dried hard as though it had been left for weeks in the sun.

  ‘Did you put this seahorse in my bed?’ Ash asked Unweder.

  ‘Seahorse? No. You must have accidentally picked it up with your pack.’

  Ash lay back, holding the little seahorse in her fist. She would have known if it had been there before: it had been right in the middle of her bed. Almost as though left there on pur
pose.

  Like a gift.

  As the days went by, so the gifts accrued. Pretty shells and flat stones with holes worn through the middle, sea beans, a lobster claw and a spiny fish skeleton, which poked her so hard in the thigh when she found it that she bled. Unweder was intrigued but not concerned.

  ‘Perhaps the sea spirits are friendlier than the oak spirits,’ he said, and there was truth in what he said. Of all the elementals Ash had sought to command, the tree elementals were the most resistant (especially proud oak), the rocks and river the most indifferent. But none had ever been friendly. She had always felt an affinity with the sea; perhaps this was why she was being given tiny, spiny gifts.

  They spent their days picking down vertical paths to the grey shore, in and out of caves that reeked of brine and dead fish. Unweder was methodical, working north, covering a few miles every morning, then spending the afternoon fishing while Ash collected seaweed for their supper. At night, they cooked in the chapel, shutters open to release the smoke and let the wild ocean wind hurl through. Unweder slept dreamless across from Ash while she lay her head on a rolled-up blanket, under which all her little sea gifts were stored. She knew instinctively they were items for her protection, even though she hadn’t yet seen who left the gifts and how. Nor had she demanded the spirit show itself. She didn’t want to frighten it or turn it against her, and besides, she never practised her magic unless it was necessary.

  One afternoon, a week and a day after they had taken up residence in the chapel, Ash decided to stay in after dinner while Unweder went fishing. She needed to rehem her cloak, and had decided to sew all her little treasures inside it. The day was sunny and still, and the to-fro rush of the sea was soothing to her soul. Patiently, with the shutter open to let in light, she folded her sea gifts one by one inside the hem and stitched it securely. This cloak had once been emerald green, but it had faded to the colour of dry grass in winter. More than once she had darned holes torn by brambles or sharp rocks. She sometimes wondered if she would ever have a new cloak again, then told herself that, surely, the end of this journey with Unweder was not far off.