Aurora Read online

  ‘I’m Lily from C-Candlewood,’ Lily stutters. ‘Who are you?’

  The snake draws so heart-stoppingly close that the ether flickers and for a moment Lily seems to glimpse a girl within the wispy presence. The snake-girl glances across to a flickering wasteland. Lily follows the glance and sees the broken arm of a bridge jutting out into nowhere.

  ‘I am Pandora. Stay out of my world.’ The luminous eyes are lethal. ‘If you ever come here again I’ll blast you into a million pieces. Go! And stay clear of my bridge. Do you hear? My bridge guard eats strangers and I’ll tell him to look out for a girl with hair like a – a . . .’ The green eyes flare as if the snake-girl finds something offensive in Lily’s fox-flame of hair. ‘Just go and don’t ever come back here!’

  The snake’s tail shoots a spray of venom-fire. Lily takes the hit on the side of the head. Her hair sizzles. The snake-girl laughs as Lily screams . . .

  ‘Shh! You’ll have the guards in!’

  The green snake, the ruined boulevards and towerstacks and the darkly sparking wasteland have all vanished. Lily is sprawled on a fur rug on a floor. Candle’s face stares down at her crossly.

  ‘What’s happened? Who were you talking to? Let me see!’

  Candle grabs the globe and the wand from her. She already has the halo.

  Lily shakes out her hair but it’s all there, not even singed.

  She looks around the lamplit room. ‘Was I here all the time? Did I disappear?’

  ‘You were here all right. Why did you scream? What did you see? You were supposed to show me!’

  Lily stares at Candle, trying to readjust to dim, ordinary reality. ‘I saw a green snake and a – a scuttling thing, all legs. Ruins and towers full of lightning. A broken bridge and . . . ’

  Candle looks nonplussed as Lily stops, lost for words.

  ‘I saw a snake,’ Lily repeats softly, ‘who knows a fox.’

  And not just any fox, Lily realizes. What do you want with Fox? That’s what the snake-girl said. Fox. As if he belonged to her.

  ‘I need to go back,’ Lily tells Candle.

  ‘Not now. You can’t. Look.’ Candle points to the drizzle of light spreading across the mottled glass of a wall. ‘We need to get the globe and halo back because if Tuck finds them missing—’

  ‘Too late,’ says a voice behind them.

  Lily and Candle gasp and spin round.

  There, in the doorway, stands Tuck.

  THE LETHAL NEED

  Cold sea air clings to his windwrap. Starlight is caught in his light blond hair, or so Lily thinks as the tall man steps into the room; but it’s only sand and salt grains, glistening in the lambent light.

  ‘I rise with the birds,’ Tuck says in a light voice, as if beginning a humorous tale, but his eyes are like cracked glass. ‘I come from my night ship and find my globe and halo gone, one of my cutlasses too, and my guards dozing. They’ll sleep forever now.’

  Panic flashes between the two girls.

  Candle’s eyes spark with fright as Tuck holds out his hand. She surrenders the parts of the wizz.

  ‘She knows the spell for it,’ Candle bursts out. ‘She knows how it works.’

  Lily shakes her head at the other girl, then sees Candle is not betraying her; she’s playing for time.

  Tuck’s eyes crinkle as he peers at Lily. ‘Is this your slave? I know you lied. A woman called Broom did come with you. Never try to fool me. My eyes may be weak but my hearing is sharp. I can always hear a lie.’

  ‘This is Lily,’ Candle says, cursing herself for her earlier witlessness. Why did she ever mention Mara and name Broom? ‘She’s just a kitchen girl.’

  Lily is thinking fast. She must not lose the wizz, not now.

  ‘I do know the spell,’ she says to Tuck. ‘I can show you.’

  ‘How could a slave,’ demands Tuck, ‘know the magic of the wizz?’

  If she tells him she is Mara’s daughter, Lily panics, would that save her or not?

  ‘My grandmother knew it,’ Lily replies. ‘She had a wizz when she was young and I learned all about it from her.’

  ‘That’s the only reason we took it,’ says Candle nervously. ‘So we could show you – as a surprise.’

  Tuck sighs and beckons to the guards by the door.

  ‘I said no one would harm you here unless you deserved it,’ he reminds Candle. ‘But you have lied and stolen. That must stop.’

  He mutters something to the guards and turns away. One guard pulls Candle over to the glass wall and places her hand flat upon it.

  Lily can’t believe what she is seeing. The second guard draws his cutlass and brings it down on the hand. The tips of Candle’s plump fingers scatter like pebbles. She makes no sound, just stares at her hand then droops like a wilted flower on to the ground.

  ‘Never take what belongs to me,’ Tuck says quietly.

  It doesn’t belong to you, Lily wants to scream, but fear chokes her and she backs away from this dangerous man. The glass wall is behind her, the guards are at the door and Tuck is in front. There is no escape.

  Lily stares at her own hands. Should she tell him who she is now? Or would she lose her life instead of her fingers because Tuck will guess that she must be here to steal back the wizz?

  ‘Come with me.’

  Lily looks up, terrified. Is it her turn now?

  ‘You will show me the spell,’ says Tuck, ‘and all that the wizz can do.’

  ‘What about Candle?’ Lily bursts out. ‘She needs help.’

  Candle is slumped on the floor, staring at her maimed hand, too shocked to cry.

  ‘Bring her woman to see to the wounds,’ Tuck orders one of the guards. ‘Take this girl to my ship,’ he tells the other.

  And he is gone.

  ‘Let me bind her hand, please.’ Lily looks into the eyes of the young guard and sees a fleck of sympathy there.

  Lily looks around and finds Candle’s nightshirt on the bed. As gently as she can, she binds the bleeding fingers with the soft cloth. The white cloth turns dark with blood. Lily pulls Candle over to the bed and lies the trembling girl down.

  ‘Broom is coming,’ she tells her. ‘She’ll know what to do.’

  Lily goes with the guard. She’ll do whatever Tuck Culpy wants. She’ll show him everything she knows about the wizz. There’s a chance for her now, if she’s clever. He has said his eyes are weak, so if she can be Tuck’s eyes for the wizz yet keep him blind to what she’s really up to . . .

  Because she must find her Fox father. She will find her way back into the Weave and search for him, if it kills her – and there’s every chance that it will.

  INSIDE EARTH AND OUT

  This is the place of my nightmares, thinks Mara. She leans against the wall of the mountain and stares into the dark.

  How many nights has she dreamed of this mountain collapsing on her, like it did on Tuck? Or woken in cold sweat having dreamed she’d lost one of the children in this deadly maze?

  And now she has walked right into her nightmare, having run out on Rowan to search for Lily after days and nights of unbearable worry ending in a final, furious row.

  Mara was a jumble of emotions as she retraced the desperate journey she once made into the mountains, past the very spot where Lily was born, back along the precarious gorge. When she reached the blockage of the landslide, she turned back, scared and at a loss – only to trip over a leather wine flask made by her own hands that told her Lily had indeed been this way. She searched and searched until she found the gap in the rubble: a doorway into the mountain. And at once Mara knew, with a sinking heart, that this was where Lily must have gone.

  These mountains have been like the walls of a great fortress, secluding Mara and her people from the dangers of the world beyond. It’s hard to believe that the same sun, moon and stars that wheel above Lake Longhope still shine down upon her drowned island in the Atlantic, on the ruins of the flooded cities, on the boat camps and pirate fleets and the sky towers; all that Mara onc
e fled but cannot ever forget.

  A world so vast and perilous that Lily might never make it home.

  Mara lifts her torch flame. The firestone trailblazers were easy to find at first but now she sees only rock and darkness. Where is the moon cave with the hot springs and the story of the drowned world carved into the rock? She should have reached it a while ago. Mara swings her torch this way and that in a rising panic. As her thoughts wandered, so did her feet. She tries to retrack and find the previous firestone – but which way was that? Now she doesn’t even know in which direction she is walking. Forward or back?

  She is lost.

  The mountain is vast, the tunnels endless. What if she can’t find her way out? She might die here and never see any of her loved ones again.

  Mara shouts Lily’s name over and over until her throat aches. The only answer is the mountain’s echo of her own voice. But she keeps moving, reigning in her fears. She will not let old terrors beat her. She will not give up.

  A soft wind blows through the mountain and her torch shivers. The air is suddenly thicker, scented, tangy. It tastes of salt, of . . .

  Ocean.

  A tremor runs through Mara. The thought that she would never again see the ocean sometimes falls on her like a blow – even though it’s the ocean that wrenched her apart from the people she loved. Maybe now it will save her. Just this once.

  Mara breathes in the salty air and follows, step by step.

  One moment she is blindly feeling her way around a twist in the tunnel . . . then the dark drains away and she is dazzled by light at the mouth of a cave. She draws in a sobbing breath of sea air. The last time she stood here Lily was a tiny mite of life inside her. Mara shades her eyes against the sun and looks out at the world on the other side of the mountain.

  And wonders where on Earth she has landed up.

  LAND GIRL IN ILIRA

  Brilliant pathways cross the sunlit water, linking the mountains and islands of a great fjord.

  Mara sits down on a rock, rubs her eyes, and looks again.

  Bridges?

  This is not the place she fled years ago – not the bleak mountain city of Ilira where she was once captured as a slave.

  Yet beneath the magnificent bridges she recognizes the same snaking channel of sea. Across the mountains are the rockways and waterfalls and ranks of scavenged car doors, a riot of rusty colour, that front the cave homes of the mountain dwellers. There, stuck in a high cleft of rock, is the crashed plane.

  But there are tracks in the rockways where dark machines creep up and down. Mara rummages in her memory for the forgotten word: she remembers seeing them in Granny’s old books when she was young.

  Trains.

  Elegant long boats puff up and down the fjord, engulfing the bridges in steam. Beyond the bridges, a mysterious sphere on a small islet far out in the fjord glows like a firestone in the embers of the setting sun.

  Mara can barely believe her eyes. Ilira is a city transformed.

  Maybe Lily is safe here, she tells herself. Maybe it’s all different now.

  A ship sails up the sea fjord. The falling sun has turned its billowing sails into nuggets of gold. Mara gasps as bridge after bridge breaks in the middle. Each bridge separates into two arms that open and rise up towards the sky, one after the other, to let the tall ship pass through. The arms fall back into place. The ship heads towards the grandest bridge with its bustling market and just as Mara is wondering what will happen to all the shops and traders if that were to break open, the ship eases into a harbour and joins a cluster of tall masts, just beyond.

  The wind carries the sound of the seafarers’ excitement. Mara cannot stop herself. She hurries down the heel of the mountain and across the rocks towards the incoming ship.

  Mara plunges into the crowd of traders and seafarers that pour off the ship. The jumble of scents and smells, strange words and accents stirs up a buried longing for the ocean world. Yet the back of her neck prickles with alarm as a word rumbles ominously through the harbour hubbub.

  War.

  A tall, young seafarer disembarks from the ship, so striking in appearance that he draws Mara’s eye. The layers of his windwrap are the colour of storm clouds. His black hair is a regiment of long braids. His strong face is as smooth and brown as an acorn. There is something imperious in his stride. He seems very sure of his place in the world, thinks Mara, wondering who he might be.

  He waves to a commanding figure at the bow of his ship, Mirkwood, as he strides alongside an older seafarer who is so wrapped in Arctic furs that his grey-flecked beard seems part of the animals he wears.

  The word war is on their lips too. Mara follows as they walk along the harbour towards Ilira, drawn to the exotic young seafarer and his frenzied talk of the outside world.

  ‘Surgents on the move. War is coming, Greyfus, all across the Earth . . . sea against sky . . . pirate fleets . . . global attack . . .’

  Mara struggles to keep pace with the seafarers in the bustle of the harbour. When they reach the shore the crowd thins out and it becomes easier to hear what they say.

  ‘Ever see one of those cities?’ the grey-bearded man in furs is saying. ‘I only travel the Arctic seas and I’ve never seen one here.’

  ‘There are none this far north,’ his young companion replies. ‘I used to think they were only legends. But there are settlers on Hallow, on the west coast of this land, who know about the sky cities. I wintered with them during the storms and made good friends there.’ His voice has a lilting rise and fall that Mara knows of old, the ocean voice of a gypsea. A soft smile relaxes the young seafarer’s intense face. ‘One day I’ll go back,’ he says, ‘when this war has all blown over. Yes, there is a girl,’ he laughs, answering the mischievous question on the older man’s face. ‘Her people were refugees. They fled a sky city when she was a child.’

  ‘Fled a sky city?’ The smile on the older man’s face turns to amazement. ‘Well, they’ll have stories to fill a winter!’

  The young seafarer lowers his voice and again Mara strains to hear. ‘Their stories of the city of New Mungo turned this scholar into a warrior,’ he tells his companion, who looks at him closely, now.

  ‘Well, don’t wait too long to return to your girl,’ the older man tells his young friend. ‘Wars don’t blow over as fast as storms. From what you have said, this one,’ he shakes his head, ‘could take a lifetime to burn out.’

  The young seafarer nods. ‘All around the planet the fuses are lit.’

  The seafarers stride ahead as Mara slows to a halt. Sky city refugees? On the west coast? Is it possible?

  A whole fleet of refugee ships escaped New Mungo, along with hers, but they lost each other out on the ocean. Mara has always held on to the hope that the others survived. She couldn’t bear the thought that, as she did with her own islanders, she led all those desperate people out on to the ocean only to lose their lives there. But if refugees from New Mungo have settled on the western coast of this vast island then it’s possible that other ships made it across the ocean and made new lives elsewhere too.

  Mara’s heart lifts. She can’t help smiling. There are still miracles in the world.

  ‘That pretty smile for me?’

  A man who looks as if he has weathered a thousand hard sea voyages has stopped bang in front of Mara. He studies her with eyes so flinty they might have been chipped off the mountain. He leans in close. Mara draws back at the reek of beer and oysters on his breath, but he grabs her arm.

  ‘Passed you by on the harbour and smelled you, girl. Smell of land, you do.’ He pulls her towards him and pushes his face into her hair. ‘Trees!’ he exclaims. ‘I never smelled trees on anyone since I was a boy.’ Mara shakes him off, but the man shouts after her. ‘Hey, land girl! Where you from?’

  People are turning to look. Mara puts her head down and hurries along the shore towards the mountain city. Her heart is thudding. An old scar seems to ache: the slave-brand once scorched into her arm right here on th
e shores of Ilira. Mara scolds herself. It hasn’t hurt in years. The ache is from the man’s grip, that’s all.

  But Mara’s hate of Ilira, a place she once journeyed through a mountain to escape, has returned. Her eyes search the bay and the bridges and the mountain rockways.

  Where are you, Lily? Please, please be safe.

  Ilira might look like a stunning new city but Mara can’t shake off the dread that it’s every bit as dangerous as it ever was.

  War all across the Earth, the young seafarer said in his lilting voice. Sea against sky.

  Mara thinks of the sky ships she and Lily saw flying north over the lake. But who are the Surgents? What did the young seafarer’s cryptic words mean? What great changes have occurred while she has hidden away in Candlewood? Mara walks through the bustling sea traders on the shore, as if through the phantoms of another world.

  An old feeling fires up inside her. Fox promised a revolution. A war against the sky cities.

  Is it possible? Could this be his war?

  Mara kills the thought. This is no time for wondering. War is on its way, that’s all she knows. So she must find Lily, and fast. Dusk is deepening over Ilira. Mara glances up at the salmon-streaked sky. She’d better make a start before it’s dark.

  The islands and waterfalls on the far side of the fjord clang with industrial noise. Cargo wagons trundle across the bridges, pulled by teams of yelping dogs. Ilira is all business and brashness, a riot of voices and smells. After the intense peace of Candlewood, Mara’s senses jangle and reel.

  Only the tiny island with the palace near the neck of the fjord is solitary and still.

  As the marketeers crammed upon the largest bridge shut up their shops for the night, people spill into the city’s wide bay. Mara wills herself to find Lily’s fox-flame hair among them but the only head she recognizes is the dark-braided one of the young seafarer with the rolling gypsea voice who knows so much of the world she has been exiled from for so long.