‘That’s not true,’ said Christopher. ‘You’re just a dirty cat with big teeth. You know nothing.’

  ‘And what do you know? You are too young: you smell of your mother’s milk. You have the bumptious, graceless confidence of the recently born.’ The manticore padded closer, and his meat-thick breath was hot as an oven on Christopher. ‘You will see. You will see it very soon. It is what will destroy you all: one man’s fear. And then we’ll feast, my people.’

  ‘What man?’

  He purred, a phlegmy rumble in his chest.

  ‘I met him a hundred years ago. He was so afraid of being at the mercy of some other man’s whims, so afraid of other people’s power, boy – so afraid of being a little average nothing of a man – that he sought to control everything that lives. Not just here in the Archipelago. In the Otherlands. Everywhere.’

  Christopher was hot with horror, but stayed where he was. He was equal to it. He had not expected to be, but he found himself able to stand, and to talk, and the terror in his blood, strong as it was, did not pull him to the floor.

  The manticore gave a snort that might have been a laugh. ‘The man who went into the maze, one hundred years, seven months and six days ago. I spoke with him, on his journey there. He was full of talk, talk-talk-sneer. He had seen there was power for the taking. He was going to make his way into the heart of the maze, he said; he was going to reach the glimourie tree.’

  The manticore sniffed. ‘I could smell it, that he was like you – from outside the Archipelago. A man from the Otherlands.’

  ‘What did he say, when you spoke to him? Did he say how he was going to get through the maze?’

  The manticore blinked – a long blink of pleasure. ‘Oh, he knew how. He had the plans. He held them in his hand; ink and vellum.’ The tongue came out again, and licked away a crumb of dead flesh from the upper lip. ‘Enough. We shouldn’t chatter for too long: it disgustulates you. It gives time for the adrenalin to flood your blood. It has a sour taste.’ He exhaled as he came closer, his great lion feet heavy on the deck.

  Christopher tried to back away, but there was nowhere to back. ‘Wait – wait!’ His only thought was to make the creature keep talking. ‘You said plans? What plans?’

  And then the air around him was on fire.

  Christopher felt it before he heard it: a sudden searing, blinding heat, and then a roar, inches from his left shoulder. He dropped to the deck, instinct acting before he had understood.

  The manticore screamed, high and terrible, a cat’s screech more than a lion’s roar. Its body was engulfed in flame. It stretched its burning wings, tried to fly, and failed.

  The burst of fire came again, and a tiny voice roared, ‘Get back, vermin! That is my biographer!’

  The manticore dropped, charred, unmoving, to the deck of the boat. Great gouts of smoke filled the air, acrid and choking. Christopher could hear Mal coughing, gasping, but something else too – laughing, he thought. The fire did not burn the wood of the boat, though it smoked – but a rope, Christopher saw, had burned instantly to ashes.

  Jacques, his tiny wings outspread, smoke still spiralling from his nostrils, turned to Christopher.

  ‘I hope you don’t object,’ he said. ‘I followed you. There were a few points I wished to make, for the account you will tell of my life.’

  FIDENS NIGHTHAND

  Nighthand’s wound grew worse as the day went on. Every movement of the boat jarred him, and each time he moved he grew whiter and whiter.

  ‘We will have to find an island,’ said Irian. ‘We have to get some help for him.’

  But there was no land in sight for miles, and no wind; only the calm blue sweep of the sea.

  ‘Is there any way to send a message to anyone?’ said Christopher. ‘Don’t you have some kind of Air and Sea Rescue?’

  Irian turned to him. ‘Say that again.’

  ‘What – Air and Sea Rescue?’

  ‘Air and sea. Air and sea.’

  She looked down at the soft afternoon sea. The water was still, and very clear.

  Irian pulled off her jumper, her boots. She strode to the prow of the boat. She glanced once backwards at Nighthand, who lay unconscious – stretched her arms to the horizon, and launched herself with a spring into a perfect swan dive. She hit the water without a ripple, and torpedoed down into the depths.

  ‘Irian! Irian!’ called Mal. She turned, panicked, to Christopher. ‘She said she can’t swim!’

  Irian was different in the water. If Mal belonged in the sky, Irian belonged at sea. She moved faster than he had ever seen a human swim, her arms tearing through the blue. She did not move straight down, but twisted left and right as she went, rippling and winding with the current. It was as if the water had a mind of its own, and she alone knew how to read it; as if the ocean itself had birthed her.

  ‘I think she said she doesn’t swim,’ said Christopher.

  Irian did not come up for air. She swam down, down, feet tight together, until she was so deep he could see nothing but a dark shape.

  And then from the water, he heard her call – a call that was not in English. It was the same high call he had heard, days before, from the nereids. A beat: he and Mal held their breath, pressed shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the boat. And then, far away, so faint it might have been the sea itself, an answering call.

  Irian erupted to the surface, thirty feet from the boat. She swam to them with long, soft strokes, and hauled herself up. Jacques gave a huff of admiration into the sea, and the waves boiled.

  ‘What did you do?’ Mal asked.

  ‘I sent for help,’ said Irian.

  Mal was looking at her with a new light in her face: it was awe. ‘How do you speak Nerish?’

  Irian looked down at the boat, hauling her clothes back on to her wet body. ‘I’m part nereid; on my father’s side, some generations back. The salt water does this: see. It only lasts a minute, but it shows.’ She held out her hands, palms up. The tips of her fingers shimmered with a silver sheen.

  ‘But that’s incredible!’ said Christopher.

  She smiled ruefully. ‘To you, maybe. It’s not something I advertise. There’s people who’d treat me as some oracular kind of mystic; and others would be afraid of what I might do, and their fear is dangerous to me. So I keep it quiet, and stay out of the water when people are around.’

  ‘Now what happens?’ said Mal.

  ‘Now we keep travelling, and we wait.’

  They waited several hours before there was a thrumming in the air, and a longma swept into view above the moving boat.

  Anja Trevasse leaned down, and called to the boat. ‘Irian Guinne! What is it? The nereids sent a message, via the ratatoskas. They said it was urgent: they said it was Nighthand.’

  She was very different from the woman they had seen before. No jewels bedecked her arms. Her hair fell in a thin grey plait, and she wore a shift dress and a dressing gown. Mal flinched at the sight of her.

  The longma dropped lower, so that its hooves almost touched water, and hovered there, beating its wings in long, slow flaps. Anja looked over at Nighthand, and her face grew stony and cold. The Berserker lay along the floor of the boat, draped in his own jacket. His eyes were closed, the lids fluttering with fever. Anja turned to Irian.

  ‘Why did you let him reach this state? Why didn’t you seek help sooner?’

  ‘You, of all people, will refrain from lecturing me,’ said Irian. ‘I want to be clear, Madam Trevasse, that I called because I couldn’t think of anybody else who might have the power to help. Otherwise I would strike you now, into the ocean.’

  ‘And you think that saying this is going to help you, somehow? To charm me?’

  ‘No,’ said Irian to Anja. ‘But you’ll either help while knowing you’re loathed, for Nighthand’s sake, or not help at all. I won’t pretend that you’re forgiven. Your kind are excused so much, so often, so easily – a flash of money and all’s well. I won’t play that game. Nighthand wouldn’t want it.’

  Panic was rising in Mal’s eyes. She whispered, ‘Oh, don’t.’

  Anja looked, nostrils flared very slightly, from Irian to the Beserker and back again. ‘Tell me what happened to him.’

  ‘It was a karkadann. Its horn caught him,’ said Irian. ‘You know of every healer in the Archipelago – can you get him to help?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Anja looked at Nighthand. There was a look in her eyes – dark, sharp, set under papery wrinkled lids – that Christopher could not begin to decode. ‘There’s a centauride – a female centaur – on Antiok. But I can’t take him there alone. I’m not strong enough to hold him on the longma’s back. You’ll need to come.’

  Irian stared at her. ‘I can’t leave two children in a boat in the middle of the ocean!’

  ‘Then you risk him falling into the sea. Which?’

  Nighthand muttered in his delirium. Christopher struggled to hear: it sounded like ‘rin’. The man’s lips were hot and dry and unnaturally white.

  Irian looked from Christopher, to Nighthand, to Mal. Agony was riven across her fine-wrought face.

  ‘Make your decision,’ said Anja. ‘Every minute you risk his life.’

  ‘They’re children.’

  The old woman drew herself up on her longma. ‘By the Immortal! You may think me whatever you wish – venal, weak, selfish, wicked, whatever you choose – I don’t care. But I am not, I hope you’ll agree, stupid. Children have been underestimated for hundreds of years. Why are you continuing the tedious tradition?’

  Nighthand spoke again. This time they could all hear what he said. He spoke through fever, but the word rang clear as a clock striking. He said: ‘Irian.’

  Anja flinched, but Irian didn’t see. Irian looked only at Nighthand. Christopher felt suddenly he was intruding on something profoundly private.

  She crouched down beside him. For the first time since they met, she touched him, carefully, deliberately, on the hand – and then on his face. His eyes were open. She rested two fingers on his cheekbone, on his brow, on his lips. She breathed harder, deeply, as if all the sky’s oxygen had rushed over her at once.

  There was a look in Irian’s face of recognition: the joy of one at sea, who looks up and sees land ahead. It was the face of somebody who has suddenly felt, for the first time, the precise shape and weight of their own swiftly beating heart.

  ‘Fidens Nighthand,’ she said.

  DRYADS

  Christopher and Mal sailed on to the dryads alone. If they were afraid, neither said so: it required both their full concentration to keep the sail steady and steer. They did not speak much. When they had time to rest, they sat shoulder to shoulder. When they slept, Jacques perched in the prow, watching them.

  She had, at her belt, Nighthand’s glamry blade in its scabbard. He had pressed it into her hand, delirious but insistent, as all four of them had lifted him on to the longma’s back. His eyes hadn’t focused.

  ‘Yours,’ he had said.

  They followed now the arrow’s point of the casapasaran. Occasionally, far below the waves, below the shadow of the boat, Christopher saw creatures moving; things too swift and fleeting to identify. Once, when the water was calmer, and they moved fast over it, he saw a mermaid, swimming deep below on her back, her tail fifteen feet long, looking up at them. He just barely glimpsed her beautiful, soft-featured face: but it was so full of fearful hope that it caught at him like a knife in the stomach. It was a demand, that look; a call to bravery. He shouted to Mal, but by the time she turned the mermaid was gone.

  Christopher caught a crab and they ate it raw, slicing the shell with the glamry blade, the flesh sweet and cool from the sea. But Mal, who was always hungry, found she couldn’t eat more than a few mouthfuls. ‘It won’t go down,’ she said.

  It was dusk when they reached the shore of Tār, the Island of Dryads. They tied up the Ever Onward at a small wooden dock at the edge of a small fishing town, and left Jacques to guard it.

  People stared out of windows and shops as they passed, looking warily at them. They had shrewd, hard-worked hands and faces. Christopher did not know if they saw very few strangers, so far north, or if there was something in Mal that made them uneasy.

  They would have been right to have found her frightening. She walked with the look of a moveable battleground. She was a one-girl army.

  They followed the casapasaran through the streets. Her eyes were on it always: more, in fact, than they needed to be. It saved her from having to look up, or around.

  The town had soon given way to a cluster of farm buildings, a barn of some kind where farm machinery was stacked, and then open land, and a forest.

  ‘Mal,’ he said, when they had been walking half an hour. ‘Are you hungry? Thirsty? Do you want to stop?’ He was, and he did. But he didn’t say so, because the time now belonged, he felt, to her.

  She shook her head. ‘If we stop, I’ll refuse to get up again. Or I’ll turn and run. So I guess we can’t stop. We need to walk faster, actually, if anything.’

  ‘You can drink as we go though.’ And after a second’s hesit­a­­­­­tion she nodded, and drank from their bottle, spilling a little down her front.

  The forest was resistant to them at first, with thorn trees and brambles – but the further in they went, the taller and richer it became. The trees rose around them, some as high as electricity pylons, some no taller than Christopher. Many were flowered, with white or yellow or green blossoms.

  ‘This is beautiful,’ he said, but she had that same fixed look, and only grunted.

  It was beautiful, though, extraordinarily so; the trees were a thousand shades of brown and jade and silver-grey. The smell – the same smell he had found at the lochan – grew richer and wilder and kinder with every step. He paused to pull two apples from a tree, and though she wouldn’t stop and he had to run to catch up with her, Mal agreed to eat one. The apple was sweet and sour at once, and the best he had ever tasted.

  The casapasaran pointed them ahead to a space in the wood where the trees seemed to thin, and they could see the setting sun in the sky. They stepped out into a clearing, circular, as perfect as if it had been made with mathematical precision.

  ‘This must be the place,’ said Christopher.

  As they entered the clearing, the casapasaran swivelled, two degrees, to point at the tallest of the trees. It looked like an oak, it was so old that its bark seemed almost metallic, silver-brown in the fading light.

  ‘What now?’

  Mal did not allow herself to hesitate. ‘Erato!’ she called. ‘Erato! We’ve come a long way to find you. Are you there?’

  There was nothing except the birds, cawing overhead.

  ‘Erato!’ She sounded very childish, suddenly, her voice thin in the huge forest. ‘Hello? You have to come out!’

  There was nothing.

  ‘Try again,’ said Christopher.

  ‘Erato!’ and then, flushing, turning away from Christopher in embarrassment, she raised her voice and called, ‘Erato, dryad of Tār, queen of the forest! The Immortal, born from the first apple of the first tree, calls out for you.’

  The dryad who stepped from the tree was so beautiful that he forgot, for a moment, the logistics of how to breathe. She looked both very old and very young. Her skin and hair were brown, and her eyes the kind of green you see only in jewellers’ windows.

  More dryads emerged, from other trees; some were eight feet tall, their skin the soft cream-brown of a sequoia, others the near-black of the alder tree. Some came from trees that were barely more than saplings, the girls smaller and younger than Mal, all long feet and hands and wide, excited eyes. All looked some form of female, and all had the same vivid, earth-rich, ever-growing look to them: rare and bold and wild.

  Behind them, he glimpsed a girl-formed dryad step from the apple tree from which he had plucked the apples. She smiled at him with the barest glimmer of a smile, and winked.

  They moved towards the children, clustering around Mal and Christopher, and for a moment they were engulfed in soft murmurs of wonder and the smell of sap, as the dryads reached out to touch them, their faces and hair and hands.

  THE POTION

  Erato held the potion in her strong, long-fingered hands. She had understood at once what they needed. ‘Some of our mothers’ stories,’ she said, ‘told that the Immortal would come again to the dryads. I did not imagine that Immortal would come to me.’

  She sniffed the potion, but did not taste it. ‘You know that it cannot be undone? Do you understand?’

  Mal nodded. ‘I know that. It has to be now.’

  Erato called out; a cry that sounded like the moving of wood in storms. There was a murmuring of surprise – some in pleasure, some in unease – and then each dryad turned to her own tree, snapped off a large branch, and came forward, holding it in her arms.

  ‘Now step back,’ said Erato to Mal.

  ‘I thought dryad-wood doesn’t burn,’ Christopher said.

  ‘It doesn’t, unless the fire is lit by a dryad. Then it burns as hot as the Somnulum. But it can be unpredictable.’

  A dozen dryads stood at the edge of the clearing, watching, as Erato bent over the great pile of wood. She rubbed her fingers together, harder and faster until they were a blur, and flames sprung from them. The pile of wood roared into light.

  ‘Return, sisters, to your trees – or if you stay, you must keep back. And children, stay silent. There can be no distractions,’ she said.

  Mal, though, could not sit. She walked around and around the clearing, her mouth in a line so tight no slither of red was visible.

  Erato tipped the potion into a pot, and held the pot sideways over the fire, so the liquid flowed to its side, close to the lip but not overflowing. Some of the fire flickered against the liquid, hissing out when it met the potion.

  After a few minutes, the potion turned from blue-black to a dark honey brown. Erato poured the liquid into a wooden cup.

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Christopher suddenly. It seemed too much: eternity. He found he wanted, desperately, to protect her; to protect the girl who was taking on all of time.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24