The Huntress: Sky Page 14

  He clears his throat loudly and keeps reading. ‘In the old times—’

  ‘When you were more younger?’ blurts Sparrow.

  ‘No, dear, much longer ago than that, if you can imagine such a thing.  It was agreed that there should be a king or queen to represent each of Sea, Sky and Land.’

  ‘So the world used to be more fair and equal?’ says Kestrel keenly, as my mind begins to wheel. The story in the bone-etching at home only told of one king of Trianukka.

  My mind dances and wheels like a sea-hawk, but the Skybrarian reads again from the book. ‘A ceremony was held on the mountain. Each Opal was placed in the crown, at dawn, by a representative of each Tribe branch and guarded there by a giant. For thousands of years, the Kings of Sea, Sky and Land kept the three Storm-Opals in the golden crown and the tribes were at peace. They were united as long as the Opals were together and safe in the Storm-Opal Crown. However, over time, power struggles took over and one person wanted to rule over all of the world.’

  For thousands of years? I thought the last King was planning the ceremony only one hundred moons and suns ago! But this book’s saying the Opals were already in place, and for so many suns and moons . . .

  ‘Skybrarian, what if we needed to find that crown? Would there be anything in this book to help?’ I ask.

  ‘Patience, child.’ His throat bubbles as he clears it. ‘Over the course of many years, the legend of the Storm-Opal Crown grew gnarled and twisted as the truth behind it was forgotten. A theory is that one king spread a falsehood, accusing a Sea-Tribe captain of stealing the crown and hiding it in the belly of a whale.’

  My heart clangs against my ribs. So that part of the story might just be a rotten lie? Rattlebones never took the crown! My face heats up so fast that my stitches throb. All the troubles that swarmed the sea, leaked from one man’s lying mouth?

  ‘What is it, Mouse?’ asks Kes.

  ‘It was a lie?’ I croak.

  The Skybrarian blinks slowly at me. ‘Vexing, isn’t it? Yes, the Sea-Tribes were very hard hit by the consequences of that myth, spread by one greedy king. Captain Rattlebones fought hard for the Sea-Tribes to survive it, but sadly her efforts were not enough. The lie took on a life of its own.’

  And why didn’t I think to ask her about it? I let the old man’s words slosh around my brain.

  ‘Rattlebones was a just soul,’ muses the Skybrarian. ‘Always willing to discuss a matter at length, over a pot of wish-tea.’

  ‘Did you know her?’

  His pale eyes meet mine, but before he can reply an angry hiss stabs my ears. ‘You got the Skybrarian out of bed?’

  I turn to see Yapok gliding towards us. ‘And you’re not to touch books without gloves. You know the rules!’

  ‘Boy, I elected to rise, you needn’t kick up such a stink. I am a little overtired now, though.’ The ancient book-rescuer twines his hair round his neck like a scarf.

  ‘Skybrarian, what you said before, about—’

  Yapok barges past me to help the Skybrarian to his feet. ‘Didn’t you hear? He said he’s overtired. Can’t you leave him be?’ He helps the old man back into his hammock while I glare at his back.

  ‘Who made those marks on you, Yapok?’ asks Kestrel, when he’s finished. She takes his hands, peering closely at the angry burns. When she pushes back his sleeve, she gasps at the sight of the burns spreading up his arm.

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ he says, blushing so hard it looks painful.

  ‘Who hurt you?’ Kestrel looks suddenly at the Skybrarian. ‘It can’t have been – him?’

  ‘No!’ snaps Yapok. ‘Of course it wasn’t him!’

  ‘Then who?’ Kes folds her arms.

  ‘No one, just – someone who found us by accident, all right!’

  A sick feeling starts to swill in my belly.

  ‘When?’ demands Crow.

  ‘Who?’ asks Kes at the same time.

  Yapok’s face glows bright red. ‘The day before you all blew in. A traveller came, looking for the Skybrarian. I said I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. But he kept sniffing around. Said he wanted help deciphering something. In the end I said I’d try to help, just to get rid of him.’ He drops his voice. ‘But I don’t want the Skybrarian to know that trouble came knocking.’

  ‘Why did he burn you?’ asks Kestrel.

  Yapok frowns. ‘He worked me to the bones, trying to break a spell. When he saw I couldn’t do it . . .’ He glances down and frowns at the mess of twisted burn scars on his hand, but when he sees us watching he pulls his hand up into his cloak sleeve and grits his teeth.

  ‘Did something else happen?’ Kes asks, rubbing the slope of her nose. ‘You have not told us everything, I am certain of it.’ She tries to wrap an arm around his shoulder but he steps out of reach, hitching his shoulders up round his neck.

  I stare at the boy. A deep, sharp coldness steals from the base of my spine to the roots of my tangles. ‘What did the traveller look like?’ I ask. My own words have dimmed, like I’m underwater.

  The others look at me in surprise. Yapok clears his throat. ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘You don’t remember someone that did that to you?’ Cos I do, I want to scream. He marked me, too. Stag’s been here. My insides twist like a wrung cloth. I turn to Crow, pull him to one side and hiss in his ear. ‘We have to get to the Huntress, now! Stag might find a way to crack the map at any moment.’

  Yapok blinks at us. ‘What are you planning? I don’t want mixing up in your troubles! If you’re up to no good I want you doing it somewhere away from here.’

  ‘Yapok,’ says Kestrel. ‘Don’t push us away.’

  I glare at him. ‘It’s all right Kes. We’ll go through to the first cave.’ I wobble over to the hearth and Kes, Crow and Sparrow come with me. When we’re all standing around the kettle in the middle of the hearth, I search for the switch Yapok pressed and we’re thrown round and round until we’re on the other side of the iceberg.

  I spread a thick fur over the ice and lie down, touching Ma’s dragonfly brooch for heart-strength and squeezing Bear’s amber amulet tight in my fingers. Sparrow curls up in an armchair and Thunderbolt watches from the top of his head.

  Crow kneels beside me and holds Tales of Night Flight open in one hand. With the other, he takes my dagger and scratches runes for warding and protection into the ice around my body.

  ‘This is your binding?’ asks Kes.

  ‘Aye,’ says Crow, passing my dagger back to me.

  Kes kneels by me. ‘Are you scared?’

  I suck in my cheek. Once I’d have said no without waiting a beat. But now I know that I’ve always been frighted, I just tried to keep it hidden, and I tried to be the bravest anyway. I don’t mind showing her my truth, so I force it through my teeth. ‘I’m frighted more than I reckoned possible.’

  ‘You’re strong though,’ she says. There’s a light of awe in her eyes, a thing that once I’d have given anything to see.

  ‘Heart-thanks.’

  ‘Ready?’ asks Crow.

  I nod. Kestrel goes to the window we first tumbled through and props it open just wide enough for a crow to fit through.

  Thaw circles over me, keeping a fierce watch.

  Crow leaps into the air, like black ink spilled into water, becoming a crow as he jumps. He pulls Thaw’s tail feathers in his beak, cawing cheekily as she rounds on him, and then darts through the window.

  I close my eyes, feeling out for the world between waking and sleeping. I remember making the carving for Da, not long before he disappeared, and how heart-glad I was when he unwrapped it, cos of the huge grin he gave me. When I think that Stag’s robbed the sails that Da added to my carving, fury pushes my spirit against the edges of my skin. I let my spirit leap up, shedding my body like a cloak.

  I soar through the window and then I’m racing alongside owls that pulse between the icebergs. One swerves into my path and I put out my spirit-hands to stop myself blending through its
feathers and thieving its body.

  My face feels puffy and blotched from the flying. A swift black shape streaks ahead of me – Crow. But what if he can’t see me? I catch him up. He gives a startled thwawk and a glint in his crow-eyes tells me he knows me. It’s like we’re both in the world between waking and sleeping, together.

  A woman leans out of a window in the top of an iceberg, painting one of the ghostways with a gloopy liquid. Inside each strand, the tiny blue owls shoot along, barely needing to flap their wings. Scrolls are clutched in their beaks.

  I hold a picture in my mind of the Huntress. Where is my ship? If my fears about Stag are true, my ship might be close by. Like last time, I feel for the invisible cord connecting us and let homesickness guide me.

  Above the western Wildersea, we’re jostled by a fierce wind thick with snow. Then we catch the right current and we’re soaring, gliding, riding the wind like a wave.

  We are one with the stars. A girl’s dream-spirit and a boy in crow’s garb. We’re part of the wild, wide sky. Crow’s eyes glow gold, like fire spirits from a dream-world.

  On the eastern edges of the Wildersea, a fleet of ships lined with guns is thrown roughly by huge waves.

  I lose sight of them when a cyclone full of fish, stretching high from the sea to the clouds, whirrs towards us. We dodge, then tear away from jagged spears of lightning.

  Then the view clears again and I see her – the Huntress.

  I fly up her flanks, past the oarsmen’s benches. When I see a weary brown face slumped over an oar, and wrists wrapped in chains, I reach out and stroke Bear’s cheek with a fingertip. The tenseness leaves his face, and he smiles.

  Crows lands in the rigging and resettles his feathers. I coil my spirit-arms through the ropes and float next to him, watching the deck. There ent a soul awake ’cept one or two half-frozen oarsmen.

  A lightning storm has come close and brought a smell of burning. Snowflakes fall more thickly and when I catch a few on my spirit-tongue they taste scorched.

  I turn to look at Crow and he takes to the air, thrumming his wide black wings powerfully against the storm winds. We glide close to the aft-deck hatch and land there, looking around to make sure. Crow’s got no choice but to change back into his boy-shape, cos we need to open the hatch to get below decks.

  His neck lengthens and his skull broadens, scalp-feathers stretching into human hair. His wings blend into a flapping cloak and arms shoot through the fabric, clutching the wooden hatch for support. His yellow claws thicken and darken into breeches and the claws lengthen, grow stubby, until he’s wearing his old salt-stained boots. When his mouth is back where it should be, he splutters and gasps, spitting out snow. He hauls open the hatch and hurries inside. I squeeze through after him, into the below-decks gloom.

  We steal through the shadows. Crow steps as silent as a thief down the steps to the captain’s cabin. No lamps are lit. Once or twice he looks round. ‘Ruddy hope you’re with me,’ he whispers softly.

  I pray with every inch of me that Stag didn’t bring the runes of Da’s message to life, and that the old song is only magyk when Sparrow sings it. Cos Stag might have slaves aboard the Huntress that could have taught him the old song.

  Like Vole. Did she turn her cloak? I’ve never known how Grandma’s prentice really felt about me. Most times, she acted like I was naught but a pox-ridden pest, caught in her curls.

  But would she really betray us by helping Stag? She never made no secret of her love for Sparrow. Anyone would reckon he farts rainbows, the way she carried on about him.

  Inside Stag’s thieved cabin looms a huge white chair. When I touch it, I shudder. It’s carved from whale bones.

  I drift through the cabin, searching. Crow stumbles behind me. ‘Where are you, ghost-girl?’ he hisses. The air is heavy with Stag’s sour breath. Crow scrabbles amongst Stag’s things, and I float around, sweeping my gaze over everything, but there’s no sign of Da’s message anywhere. Then Crow sweeps a hand under the map table, pulling out clumps of dust.

  Footsteps thud on the stairs. Panic simmers in my gut.

  ‘Hell’s teeth, that storm!’ comes Stag’s voice, followed up with a great rattling cough.

  Crow ducks behind the huge clothes chest. I reach across the dream-realm and use all my force to try to touch his arm and let him feel it. He jumps slightly, spinning to face me. Then calmness fills his eyes and he nods. He knows I’m with him. Wonderment fills me – this is the strangest dream-dance of my life, and the most powerful.

  Stag enters the cabin with Axe-Thrower, the Fangtooth, prowling in his wake. She pulls something from inside her cloak and I yearn to snatch it straight out of her fingers. It’s the message. ‘This is useless,’ she hisses around her fangs. She throws it down on the table. ‘It means nothing beyond what we have already read.’

  Stag throws himself onto his whale-throne and scratches his face irritably, fingernails rasping against his silver-flecked beard. Even through the smoke and the dream-dance I can smell his metallic sharpness and his soapy cedar scent, as though it’s seeping out from beneath his skin.

  A massive wave hits the ship, showering against the porthole, and Stag leans over and throws up into a bucket by the side of his gruesome chair. Then he sits up, panting and wiping his mouth. He stares at Axe-Thrower, fiddling with a ring on his little finger – Grandma’s merwraith-shaped poison ring. Rage bubbles inside me. ‘The Tribesfolk must know something about how to work this vile sorcery.’ He spits the words through his teeth like they’re poison.

  Axe-Thrower looks down at her boots. ‘They deny all knowledge.’ She steps closer to the clothes chest. Crow tenses like a bowstring. ‘Vole refuses to speak, and continues to starve herself.’

  So Vole is loyal! Guilt prickles me, together with fear.

  Stag grabs the Fangtooth’s wrist and drags her closer to him. ‘I have taught you all the ways I know to make people obey. Remind me why I ever thought your Tribe would prove useful to me?’ he snarls.

  ‘I am your first mate! I am the reason you can keep all these pathetics in order!’

  ‘You are nothing to me unless you do your duty.’ He rolls his eyes up the length of her, coldly. ‘I need the old song to reveal the secret of this message. So you will force the song from someone’s mouth—’ His voice rises in fury, then he takes a deep breath and smiles. ‘Otherwise, you will be sent to the breaking yards along with this ship and her crew.’

  Fright sets my insides on fire. I feel my spirit flickering, fighting, wanting to flee.

  Axe-Thrower pauses, fingers on the message.

  ‘On reflection, I’ll do it myself,’ says Stag. ‘Leave the note with me, and get out.’

  But Axe-Thrower sniffs the air. ‘Captain – something is here—’

  ‘I said get out!’ he roars, and it’s the first and last time I’ll ever be grateful to that grim-blubber, cos he’s just saved Crow from being sniffed out by a Fangtooth.

  Suddenly I can feel feathers from far away, stroking my face. Thaw? Then fingers gripping my arm and shaking me. ‘Mouse, wake up!’

  We have to hurry! What if Sparrow’s in trouble?

  Waves hurl the ship suddenly to the right and Stag’s whale-throne is heaved towards the wall. He stands, clutches at the wall, cursing bitterly under his breath. Then he strides from the cabin, cos even a murdering wretch has to be a captain when that’s the life he’s asked for.

  As soon as he’s gone, Crow snatches Da’s message from the table. He puts it in his mouth as he runs up the stairs, legs beginning to shorten, nose growing long and sharp. I swim through the air after him. I reach the deck and freeze. Crow’s a bird again, soaring away from the ship, but Stag’s standing there watching him with a frown. Did he recognise Crow?

  When Stag lifts a gun to his shoulder to take aim at my friend, an image of Grandma punches into my mind and my spirit roars like a beast. I arrow through the space between sleeping and waking, willing my fingernails long and sharp as Thaw’s, and
then I’m dragging claws across Stag’s face. He reels back, dropping the gun, and Crow zooms away into the leaden sky, dodging lightning bolts. The message is clamped tightly in his beak.

  Blood washes down Stag’s cheek as though from nowhere, and he clutches his face. ‘Light lamps!’

  I spring into the air, as guns crack the sky.

  I follow the sleek black flicker of Crow’s wings, leading us back towards the Iceberg Forest, as the fire spirits flicker over the icescape. A lightning storm flashes bright, beyond the forest. The Opal sparks its reply, sending tiny shocks through my pocket that I can feel even in my dream-dance.

  Blue tangles of whale-song brush my cheek. Higher and higher we fly, into fog and cloud.

  Every few beats, near and far, the icebergs creak out sad groans. Sometimes their voices are lost in the crashing of the sea at their feet. Other times the wind carries wolf howls.

  Suddenly a lightning bolt slashes into one of the bergs, carving off a great slab of gritty ice. The slab smashes into the iceberg lower down and someone screams. Then there’s a huge thunk-crash-sshhhhh as it plunges into the sea.

  Above a rocking bridge between two icebergs, three tribesfolk lean out of a window in the ice, throwing ropes around the top of another berg to try to keep it from being wrenched in two by the storm. But then another bolt of lightning pierces the frozen clouds, and the sky erupts in sharp, glittering shards and the stench of burning. The peak of the iceberg peels in two and the ropes are ripped from the tribesfolks’ hands, pulling one out of the window. He screams as he’s thrown into the air and gulped by the darkness.

  Soon we’re flying over Yapok’s wonky iceberg. Crow swoops through the window and I follow.

  A black-haired girl is curled, asleep, on a fur. Glowing runes are scratched into the ice around her. A blind boy shakes the girl’s arm. ‘Wake up! Thaw is vexed at you!’

  When I open my eyes, I’m back in the Skybrary.

  Sparrow crouches next to me. ‘You took ages to wake up!’ Thunderbolt clings to a strand of his hair and he peers through her light into my eyes. Thaw sits on his shoulder.