Aurora Page 2

  A lone star glistens; a cool blue light.

  Lily scrapes and squeezes through tree trunks, keeping her eyes on the blue light. Now she can see a sprinkle of stars. She pushes on. And there, right above her head, is the star crown of Queen Cass. Lily lowers her gaze, lifts the lamp. The trees are thinning out. Just a few more trunks and branches to push past . . .

  All at once the night opens up. Lily steps out of the forest, dazzled by a sky of hot stars. The North Wind shakes them until they fall from the heavens and gust down to sizzle upon the icy lake.

  Far out on Lake Longhope, the world is changing fast. Great pillars and towers tumble as the huge ice cathedrals crumble into thundering whiteness. Lily blinks, eyes tingling in the blast of ice-wind. Ice crystals land in the waves of tawny hair that frame her soft, bright-eyed face. She puffs out a cloud of a sigh. Winter is ending, yet it’s impossible not to feel a stab of sadness at such a spectacular death. Icy shock-waves crash all along the shore. Slowly, slowly, the lake settles into stillness. Lily blinks again. Apart from chunks of icy debris, it’s as if the armada of icebergs had never been.

  A wolf howl makes the girl’s skin prickle. She listens intently, chewing her lip. Her heartbeat quickens as she crunches across an expanse of frosted ferns and runs on to the rocky lake shore. That howl, Lily is sure, does not belong to a true wolf.

  ‘Wing!’

  She swings the lamp to cast its light across the rocky shore. A second howl fills the night. But this one is not Wing. There is something awful in this wolf cry, as if it carries all the loneliness of the world.

  The cry tears at Lily’s insides. Some animal part of her understands the wolf’s dread song. She calls for Wing once again, as loud as she dares, scanning the dark shore, hearing her own cry roam across Lake Longhope.

  On Candlewood Spire, a huge spike of granite resembling a giant finger fossilized in rock, a wolfish figure leaps from a perch and lands, on all fours, on the shore. Starlight glistens on its long snout and coat of silvery fur. The figure stands upright. Brash echoes of its heavy tread on the pebble shore clatter across the lake as it runs towards her.

  The smell of Wing’s wolf coat, musky and rank, reaches her before he does. The head of his dead wolf brother lolls on one shoulder, still attached to the thick fur he wears like a second skin. The wolf’s eyes have been replaced by amber firestones; Wing’s own eyes burn with the blue fire of the stars.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ Lily bursts out. ‘Winter felt like forever!’

  She wants to bury herself in his wolfskin as she would when she was small. Something stops her now. But Wing laughs away her awkwardness, hugging her tight in the deep fur of his wolf coat and it’s as if he has never been away.

  ‘Mountain thunder!’ he gasps, his breath hot in her hair.

  Lily looks up at a face chiselled by winter. His lean, strong features and sleek-haired skin make Wing seem more wolfish than ever. He is more man than boy now. A wolfman, thinks Lily, though no wolf has webbed hands and feet and soft neck gills and swims all summer long in the lake, like a fish. Wolfman or human fish? Lily has no idea what he is and she doesn’t care. He is Wing.

  She breaks free of a hug that’s full of the new strength she sensed in him as he ran towards her. The strange shyness sweeps through Lily once again as she absorbs all his subtle changes and huddles into her deerskin parka, sharply aware of the bewildering body she has grown during her winter hibernation; all the curves and softnesses where there had been skinny straight lines.

  Wing is studying her in the starlight, nuzzling her hair as if to memorize her subtly changed scent, absorbing all her changes with a slow smile.

  ‘Wasn’t thunder – it was the icebergs,’ Lily says, to divert him. ‘You were on the spire, you saw them crash!’

  ‘Icebergs,’ Wing nods, ‘and mountain thunder.’

  He points to the starlit crests of the southern mountains and mimics the roar that he heard. Fluent in the language of the wild, Wing stumbles with human words, even more so after a long winter with the wolves. But Lily has known him forever and can patch together the bare scraps of his speech.

  ‘When I is cub,’ Wing measures the height of a small child with his hands, ‘we cross sea. On ship.’ Lily watches Wing’s webbed fingers form pictures in the cold air to illustrate his bare words. He makes a tunnelling motion. ‘Go through mountain.’

  Lily lifts her head to look beyond the head of the lake to the mountain pass where she was born at the end of that desperate journey to find a home in the high lands of the flooded world.

  ‘Earth roar.’ Wing crouches and smashes a fist on to the pebbles at Lily’s feet. ‘Mountain thunder. Mountain crash on Tuck.’

  Wing rarely speaks so much, so intensely, at least not in words. Lily stares, amazed, absorbing what he has said.

  ‘Tuck?’ Her mouth falls open. ‘Tuck is a person?’

  Lily has only ever known the words Tuck Culpy as a curse.

  ‘A dead person,’ Wing elaborates.

  ‘Why has no one ever told his story?’ Lily is bewildered.

  How often has she heard the stories of her people? Tales of Granny Mary, her great-grandmother, who fought to save the people of the North Atlantic islands when the seas first rose; the exodus across the ocean, led by Mara, her mother, when the island drowned; her parents’ great escape from the the sky city and its netherworld, with the Treenesters and Wing’s band of urchins; and the tragic loss of Broomielaw and her baby at the end of their journey across the world’s ocean . . .

  Yet no one has ever breathed a word of this mysterious Tuck – except as a curse.

  Wing scratches the dead snout of his brother wolf, frowning, avoiding her eyes. Lily prods him.

  ‘Why is his name cursed?’ she demands.

  ‘Tuck take globe,’ says Wing at last. ‘Mara’s globe.’

  Again, his hands help him tell the story and from his own breath cloud Wing seems to magic up the forms of a globe and a tiny wand – and the strange halo that Lily knows lies inside the little wooden box covered in tree-like patterns that once belonged to Granny Mary and is kept zipped away in her mother’s tattered old backpack.

  ‘The globe,’ whispers Lily, remembering the tales she loved her mother to tell when she was small. Tales of a magical world inside a globe . . .

  Wing nods. ‘Mara’s magic wizz.’

  ‘Tuck stole the globe?’ Lily chews on a tail of her tawny hair, frowning, trying to piece together the mystery. ‘But the mountain crashed down on Tuck?’ She sucks in a breath, understanding now. ‘So the globe is . . .’

  ‘Under mountain,’ says Wing. ‘Tuck too.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Then Tuck’s crime was so hateful that her people did not want to tell his story. But he hasn’t been forgotten. Mara flinches on the rare occasions that Lily’s father, Rowan, mutters the name in anger.

  ‘Earth roar again,’ Wing repeats.

  ‘Tonight, you mean? That’s what you heard?’

  Wing nods.

  Lily stares at the southern mountains.

  In the hungriest heart of winter, when the wolves howl ever closer to Candlewood, the forest dwellers huddle around crackling fires in the earth burrows, watching the smoke puff up through the chimneys in the forest floor. Then, Lily will sink into all the old tales of the world that lies beyond the lake and the mountains. A world of drowned lands and boat people where cities are as tall as the sky and ramshackle pirate fleets rampage across the oceans.

  The stories help battle the long months in the winter burrow when Lily is so bored and restless she can barely live with herself, never mind anyone else. She might be stirring soup or squabbling with her small brothers, but in her mind’s eye she’s crossing mountain ranges, adventuring across the ocean, sailing to towering cities with a band of imagined friends. Just as her mother once did, for real.

  ‘Let’s see why Earth roared.’ Lily grabs Wing’s hand. ‘What if we found a way back through to the ocean world? Win
g, it’s been so long since we had an adventure. I thought I’d die of boredom this winter.’

  She yelps with excitement as she sees the longing in Wing’s eyes. The ocean beyond the mountains is his lost home. Does she dare go? She’d have a hundred punishment chores on her return, but so what? It’d be worth it for a glimpse of the ocean she has never seen.

  In her mind’s eye she is already scribbling a charcoaled Don’t worry note on a scrap of wood-pulp paper and creeping out of the burrow in the dead of night. Just herself and Wing. Just for a day or so. Just to see . . .

  A long howl from Wolf Mountain interrupts Lily’s magnificent dream. Wing tenses, all instincts attuned in an instant to the wolf call. Before Lily can stop him, he is running full pelt across the wide shore towards the fierce, beckoning cry.

  WOLF MOUNTAIN

  The cry ignites a hot ball of jealousy in the pit of Lily’s stomach. It’s the wolfwoman, Scarwell, calling Wing home. Furious, Lily races across the shore towards the mountain, where Wing has vanished into the dark.

  The lone howl is joined by another, then another and still more. The bone-chilling wolfsong pours down into the vast bowl of the lake. Lily’s heart thuds, every hair on her body raised in fright.

  ‘Great Skua!’ she cries. ‘Wing! Where are you?’

  In the shadow of the mountain, the night deepens around her. She’s left her lamp back at the lake and can hardly see a thing. She gasps as something moves through the darkness towards her. Then the familiar cold, leathery skin of Wing’s hand clasps hers. He gives a loud, harsh bark and the howling fades.

  ‘Scar’s birthing,’ he announces.

  Lily snatches her hand from Wing’s.

  ‘Scarwell’s having a baby?’

  Her voice quavers. Her mind races. She feels sick.

  Lily was a small child when Scarwell was thrown out of Candlewood. No one would ever say exactly why, but the pack of unruly urchins from the netherworld were always causing trouble – and Scarwell was more trouble than all of them put together. Their wild natures, along with their sleek-haired skins, webbed fingers and toes and, most of all, their unnervingly fish-like gills meant they were not human, said the wary forest dwellers. There was a great sigh of relief in Candlewood when they left with the outcast Scarwell.

  Only Little Wing stayed, because he was Mara’s special urchin; he had saved her life once. He became Lily’s older guardian as she toddled about the forest, her only playmate as she grew into a mischievous sprite of a girl, scrambling up trees and splashing about on logs on the lake. No other forest children had yet been born. Yet the call of the wild world was stronger even than his bond with Lily and when Scarwell came back for Wing he too followed her to live on Wolf Mountain.

  But guilt engulfed Candlewood as the summer sun died and the long polar night descended on the top of the world. Lily’s tears for her beloved Wing were answered when the forest dwellers decided that the urchins could not be left to perish in the teeth of winter or the jaws of a wolf. The hunters Pollock and Possil were sent to search the mountains, though even they dared not venture into the wolf caves.

  The urchins who had survived both the onset of winter and the wolves were brought back to live in the safety of Candlewood. But Wing wouldn’t come. The pulse of the wild world beat too fiercely in him, as it did in Scarwell. Together, they took to the world of the wolves. Lily’s only consolation was that Wing always came back to her, to the human world and to the lake, when the sun returned.

  Scarwell was never seen again.

  The wolfwoman is close to no other human except Wing. If she is birthing, Lily knows the baby must be his.

  But Wing is chuckling softly.

  ‘Not Scar! The she-wolf called Lunder. Scar births the pups.’ His voice turns sombre. ‘They come before sun, they die.’

  A wolf birth! Relief sweeps through Lily. Feeling foolish, she laughs, but a jittery feeling remains. What is between Wing and Scarwell? She can never tell and cannot bear to think of them so close together all winter in the wolf caves.

  ‘The sun is back now,’ Lily reminds him, though it’s only an ember sun as yet.

  He pauses as they reach the huge tumble of boulders at the foot of the mountain.

  ‘Don’t go,’ Lily murmurs. ‘She’s had you all winter.’

  His eyes linger on her face. Lily feels her skin burn in his gaze.

  ‘Come,’ he says.

  Lily reads the mischievous glint in Wing’s eyes. ‘To Scarwell’s cave? She’d have me for supper!’

  ‘My cave too,’ Wing insists. ‘Come.’

  She should go home. Hungry winter wolves are killers. But gnawing curiosity about Wing’s life with Scarwell overcomes her sense. And Lily cannot bear one more suffocating night in the burrow with her brothers bothering her and her parents bickering with each other, as they always do. Wing will keep her safe.

  He pulls her deep into his musky wolfskin again, rubbing the fur all over her, covering her in its scent so that the wolves won’t rip her to shreds, until Lily crackles with static.

  ‘Keep close,’ he tells her.

  Wing climbs as if a secret trail leads him up through channels in the steep rockways. But Wolf Mountain has cruel tricks to repel strangers. Rocks as sharp as fangs tear at Lily’s deerskin clothing as she scrambles to keep up. She doesn’t care about scrapes and bruises. Winter is behind her. There’s a starwind in her hair, the vast magic of the universe sparkles in her eyes, and she feels tinglingly alive.

  All of a sudden the hairs on the back of her neck warn of a danger she can’t see. A deep vibration in the air. A granite sound, like the voice of the mountain itself.

  Lily looks up. A host of terrifying eyes, the vivid orange of firestones, stare down from a ledge above. Wolf breaths steam in the darkness.

  Too late, Lily wishes she were back home in the cosy burrow. Anywhere but here.

  SCARWELL’S CAVE

  Lily has never been so close to a lone wolf, never mind a whole pack. Their noise shakes the walls of her heart. She slips under Wing’s wolf coat and clings to him, feeling his galloping heart through the ragged deer hide wrappings he wears under his furs, wishing she could leap off the mountain and land safely among the branches of Candlewood. What a fool she’s been!

  Wing is growling his own warning in wolf-tongue. The noise of the pack grows a notch less ferocious. Lily peeks out from under Wing’s arm and gasps as vivid eyes meet her own, the dark pupils wells of distilled danger.

  ‘Be slow,’says Wing. ‘Don’t fright ’em.’

  Frighten them? Lily is abuzz with terror as Wing eases her out from under his wolf coat and the pack erupt into slavering excitement.

  At the fire at the mouth of a cave a wolf rises up on to its hind legs and struts forward. Wing reaches out and wraps his arms around it.

  Lily lets out a shuddering breath. It’s Scarwell, of course.

  A patchwork of furs cover the wiry figure of the young woman. Wolf tails hang around her, knotted into her knee-length straggle of hair. With all the battle scars on her downy skin, she is well-named.

  Wing plants himself between Lily and the wolves as Scarwell speaks to the animals in a low snarl. The pack quietens into unnerving stillness.

  What is the power she holds over the wolves? Is Wing, Lily wonders, also captured in Scarwell’s fierce spell?

  ‘Mara’s pup.’ Scarwell paces around Lily, her dark eyes narrowing through locks of matted hair.’ Not brave like Mara?’

  ‘Well my mother’s a legend,’ Lily retorts, with fake bravado. ‘Just like you.’

  Scarwell stops dead, head tilted to one side.

  ‘Legend?’

  ‘The Woman Who Turned Wolf,’ says Lily.

  Scarwell has become as still as her wolves. So feral is she that Lily cannot judge her age in human time. There is a searing quality in her, a wolfish sensuality as she absorbs Lily’s presence that makes the younger girl huddle into her parka, slammed back into awkward girlhood. The jealousy
that has smouldered in Lily all the long winter months when Wing is alone here in the caves with this wild young woman now flares into desperation. She is no match for Scarwell.

  ‘I am a story?’ Scarwell demands. ‘The forest people make me a story?’

  ‘Gorbals did,’ Lily affirms.

  Scarwell smirks. Then reaches out, grabs a handful of the tawny hair that Lily likes to hide behind, and studies her young rival’s face. The wolfwoman’s lips draw back from her teeth in a silent snarl. She throws the hair back across Lily’s face like a slap and struts away. But Lily saw something in the older girl’s face that brings a sudden awareness of her own power. She sidles up close to Wing and they follow Scarwell into her cave.

  It stinks.

  The cave reeks of wolf and rotting flesh. The floor is littered with furs and skins and bones; some gnawed white and clean, others blackening, with shreds of flesh still stuck to them. Wing peers into a dark nook of the cave where an exhausted wolf mother is licking clean her new litter. The fond look he exchanges with Scarwell as he croons over the pups makes Lily turn away.

  She yelps in fright as she finds herself face to face with a beast. It stands upright like a man. But it’s only a stuffed beast, Lily sees, long dead; yet unlike any ever hunted around Lake Longhope. There is something uncannily human about its cheeky, clever face. Lily strokes the beast’s hairy hand; he has five fingers, unwebbed, like hers.

  ‘What is he?’ she asks Wing.

  ‘Nederwuld beast.’

  ‘Netherworld?’

  Wing crouches beside her and begins to draw in the dirt of the cave floor. Lily watches him sketch the lines of a structure as majestic as the ice cathedrals that have collapsed into Lake Longhope and remembers her people’s tales of the drowned netherworld they once fled.

  ‘The tower full of books? The ruined cathedral? The museum of old things?’

  ‘’Zeeum!’ says Wing triumphantly. ‘Beast from ’zeeum. Scar bring him on ship.’

  Once again, Lily feels excluded from all that they share. The dead beast, Whig and Scarwell come from a world that for Lily is as distant and mystifying as the moon. Knowing Scarwell is watching her every move, Lily takes Wing’s hand in hers and strokes his webbed fingers.