by Amy Wilson
It’s funny to think she doesn’t like going in on her own. She seems so confident; she glows with a kind of ready-for-anything energy.
‘Are we in the same form room? I didn’t see you there yesterday . . .’
‘Oh, I think you must’ve come in late, I was running an errand for Miss Olive. She has trouble with printers. So, about Winterspell,’ she says, as we head in, her voice low. ‘Do you live there? What can you tell me?’
My heart thuds. Why do all things lead back to Winterspell?
‘Uh, I don’t know. Like what?’
‘I wanted to go for a bit of an explore in there, but my mum says it’s forbidden – something about pollution in the water and ancient trees that fall without warning. And the kids at school say it’s haunted. Which can’t be true?’
She stares at me as we head up the steps to our form room. Unblinking owl eyes.
Can you start a friendship with lies?
No.
‘Ah, I don’t know about haunted, exactly,’ I say. ‘But my nan says we should avoid it.’
‘Even though you live so close?’
I hold in a sigh. She’s not going to give up so easily, but it’s the last thing I need this morning. My worlds are getting tangled already; with every step I take towards humanity, Winterspell creeps further in.
‘We used to go in there sometimes,’ I say, ‘but it’s creepy, and it’s got worse. Strange noises at night; weird lights flashing between the trees.’
It was supposed to be a little bit of truth to put her off, but now her eyes are glowing. ‘Really? Wow. I do believe in ghouls, you know. My Mamani has some very creepy stories about them. And if you were a dark spirit like they are, then an old forest like Winterspell would be the perfect place to hide . . . I’m not sure I’d want to be there, but everyone’s different. Mum says it’s the pollution that makes the mist rise when the sun sets, but I don’t know. And Yanny won’t tell me anything.’
‘He lives in there?’ I ask, my voice thin at the thought of the dark spirit who does hang out in Winterspell, somewhere. My father, who does not love strongly enough to find his way through.
‘Well, I think he does. He gets very strange about it when I ask him.’
‘Where do you live?’ I ask, taking my coat off as we find seats in the form room.
‘In town,’ she says. ‘It’s OK. I didn’t really want to move, but Mum got a new job, and so . . . here we are.’ She stares out of the window. ‘We lived in the city before; it feels quiet here. Everything’s a bit strange. Mum says it’s just because it’s new, but I don’t know. I think it’s genuinely weird.’
I grin as Miss Olive starts reading out the register. ‘It’s definitely weird.’
‘Zara Nassar?’
‘HERE!’ she shouts in reply to Miss Olive, before lowering her voice again. ‘I don’t know why Yanny won’t talk about it.’
‘Maybe it’s not weird to him. If he lives there.’
‘I s’pose.’ She sighs. ‘But there are definitely secrets in that forest, and up that weird staircase.’ Her face grows serious, and she plays with the cuff of her jumper. ‘I do not like secrets, Stella.’
‘Here,’ I say, raising my hand as Miss Olive gets to my name. I look back at Zara. ‘But doesn’t everybody have secrets?’
‘You talk far too much sense for this time on a Friday morning,’ she says. ‘Everybody might have them, but that doesn’t mean they should!’
Just then, Yanny rushes into the form room. Miss Olive glowers at him, and he gives her a smile that I swear radiates straight to her. She checks his name off her list with a gentle shake of her head, and then the bell rings, and we all pick up our stuff and head out again, catching him in the tide and swirling back out into the corridor.
‘G’morning,’ he says, untangling himself from the knot of kids heading in one direction, to come with us towards science. ‘Missed you at the gate, Zara.’
‘No you didn’t.’
‘I don’t know how it happens,’ he says, charging up the steps two at a time. ‘I leave at the right time – Ma hassles me enough . . . It just seems to take too long to get here.’
‘Maybe you dawdle,’ she says. And then, with a wink at me: ‘Maybe it’s the spirits in the forest, slowing you down.’
He falters on the landing for a split second as she charges up past him, and she doesn’t notice how he blanches, as if she hit him in the stomach. It’s there and gone in a blink, and then he rushes on after her, bag swinging, bright as ever, but the feeling remains in my belly all through the morning, and I can’t look him in the eye, even when we have art again without Zara. It’s just me and him sitting at the end of a big table, and the teacher is late, so everyone’s chatting, except I don’t know what to say to him.
‘How’s it going?’ he asks.
His freckles glow under the artificial lights; it’s dark, and the clouds are stormy outside, and the whole place suddenly feels claustrophobic. Every lesson is a different textbook, a different teacher, a different classroom down a different corridor. I’ve got lost every time I’ve looked for a loo, and I don’t know anything. I take a deep breath in, filling my chest, and breathe it out slowly, lowering my gaze to the old wood table with its scored lines and crossed-out words.
‘Stella?’
‘It’s different,’ I say. ‘I wanted it so much. I still do. But it isn’t what I thought it would be.’
He doesn’t say anything, and it takes me a long time to look up from the desk. When I do, he’s staring at me.
‘Sorry . . .’ I start, but he shakes his head.
‘I was trying to imagine how it feels. You really never . . . You never went to school before?’
‘No.’
‘So what did you do?’ his curiosity is suddenly needle-sharp.
I shrug. ‘It’s just me and Nan at home, and Peg, my . . . my pet. There’s lots to do, but . . . it was lonely.’
‘You’ll like it here,’ he says. ‘You’ll fit right in. I can feel it.’
He smiles. There’s that flicker of magic, only this time it doesn’t tug at me. It soothes, like the flame of a candle. I remember when Nan used to glow like that, before she faded.
Our last visit to Winterspell was the winter I turned ten. That was when I knew for sure what Nan was. She’d talked to me for years about the legends of the fae, and the Plaga that strikes every few generations, and that this time took only my mother. About how the grief of my father, a fae king in his prime, had become a visceral thing that birthed the shadows that have blighted Winterspell ever since.
How she’d hidden me so that his shadows, grown into their own power over all this time, would not be able to reach Winterspell’s last future hope: me.
She never told me what she was.
I thought she was flesh and blood, a sprite just like me. Like my father, the tree sprite who I barely remembered, just a blur at the edge of my mind – stern one minute, laughing the next. Like a storm in spring. I wanted to know him, even as the very idea of being close to him now terrified me.
That night, we stole between the glowing stalks of winter trees at sunset, and she held me close as ever and used her magic to shield us, and we watched as tiny, bright figures leaped between branches. Spiderwebs gleamed like copper wire, and the trees flexed their roots beneath the hard earth with deep sighs, and there was singing in the distance. We skirted around them, watching, listening, and we trod on our familiar path, searching once more for the cursed palace.
But as we went, the way grew colder. Frost gathered in every nook. Trees hung with bright daggers of ice. And between their stark branches, the shadows came. They were wolves, and men eight feet tall, showing their teeth and claws, howling into the grey winter air. We pushed on, for only if we reached the palace could the king be raised – maybe even brought back to himself. Back to me. But the shadows were bolder. They were snakes upon our path, and bats in our hair, they were great monsters, and when they touched me, it hurt. Wi
th every breath, they took something from me – and as they took, they grew.
The terror overtook curiosity.
‘Nan,’ I managed, when I could barely move. She turned back, and horror whickered across her face. She rushed back to me, howling, cutting a swathe through the shadows.
And then the thundering hooves of the centaurs approached, and the shadows turned at the noise, and we scrambled back, hidden from the fae beneath Nan’s glamour. Our breath steamed as we tripped on tangled roots, and the barren sticks of willow reached for our clothes, as roiling dark clouds withered through the trees. A great stag bellowed, rushing through the forest by our side, and when I looked at Nan, she was barely there at all.
‘Nan,’ I hissed, pulling at her hand, but my own went through hers. ‘Nan!’
‘Hush,’ she whispered, and her eyes were dark hollows. ‘Don’t let him hear you now, Stella. Come after me. Come, come, Stella – as fast as you can.’
She was like bright smoke herself though, her form twisted as we flew back through the forest, and while I got scraped and tripped, the branches snapping with every pace, nothing touched her at all.
‘Stop,’ I whimpered, stumbling as we got out on to the moorland that ran up to the orchard at the back of our house. ‘I don’t know . . . Who are you? What’s happening?’
‘Keep coming, Stella!’ she wailed, turning and clutching at me. Her fingers gripped my wrist, and they were cold and hard. ‘I’ll tell you – I’ll explain – but we must run. We must keep going until we get home!’
Home.
The word flashed through me. What was home, on the edge of this wilderness? What was home, with this Nan who grew thin as cloud, until I could see the stars through the outline of her body, as her hand gripped mine, and we flew over uneven ground to the silver wire of home, as we ran from my father’s hordes of fear and malice?
That was the night I discovered Nan was a ghost. I knew, after that, there was nothing for me there, in that forest. My father was only a memory, impossible to reach, and Nan had used everything she could to hide us from his shadows. That was why she’d got so thin, and she never really recovered from it. That was how the magic of that other world soured. It’s a terrifying, wild place where nothing is as it seems. Where I am not welcome. And it’s the real world – the warmth of the humanity I read about in my favourite books – that I need.
That was the night I started to dream of school.
Mrs Mandrake is late, and I cannot help but flit, watching for her. First from the windows, and then in the orchard, where I decide it’s finally time to pick up the fallen apples. Nan laughs at me when I collect the basket from the top of the washing machine, and Peg hops in, a tiny brown mouse huddling into the twist of willow. I grab a carrot and chop it small, and when Onion bustles up to me, I scatter the pieces across the grass.
‘You spoil them,’ Peg says, winking up over the side of the basket as Basil and Salt rush up to grab their share. ‘They’re not even laying at the moment!’
‘They will,’ I say. ‘In spring.’
‘Not much use until then.’ He sighs. He does love a good egg. ‘We could always have chicken for dinner . . .’
‘Peg!’
I turn to the orchard, a dozen stocky apple and pear trees, their leaves golden brown now and starting to drift to the ground. In the summer, I climb up and read in the branches of my favourite tree – the one closest to the boundary, where the fork between two branches is wide and smooth.
The apples are small and sweet, their skin a dusky pink that bleeds into pale yellow. I leave the ones that have already been half eaten by insects and gather the rest, carefully dropping them into the basket. Peg organizes them as I go, so that by the time we’ve finished, they look like a rolling sunrise.
‘Very pretty,’ I say, carting them into the kitchen, just as the front gate squeaks, setting off a row of tiny bells over the fireplace. ‘Mrs Mandrake!’
‘She’ll be happy you’re going to school,’ says Nan, settling into the armchair and stoking the flames with a wave of her hand. ‘Always on about it, she was.’
‘I didn’t realize,’ I say, picking up my list, unfolding it, and folding it again.
‘Oh, she did it on the quiet. Little hints – worried you’d be lonely.’
‘Imagine that,’ I say, watching through the window as Mrs Mandrake bobs around the side of the house before knocking on the kitchen door. She pulls a trailer with her, loaded with food, and I rush to help unpack it as Nan gathers all her strength to look like a real, flesh-and-blood person. There’s bacon, and chestnuts, a jar of cocoa, a fruit loaf and orange juice, a bag of oats, dried pasta, and a basket of tomatoes and shiny bell peppers.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ I say when we’re done putting it away, and Mrs Mandrake sits at the table opposite Nan and looks down at my list. Her brown eyes are dancing when she looks up again.
‘What’s this about scented pens?’ she asks with a smile. ‘And a calculator? A PE kit! Did you win her over, Stella?’
‘No. She was flagrantly disobedient and off she went without permission,’ Nan says. ‘And she’s determined to continue, so we’re calling it a trial period.’
‘Good job,’ Mrs Mandrake says. ‘About time she got herself out there in the world.’
Nan huffs, and Mrs Mandrake winks at me. And then she dashes back out to her truck to get the crumpets to go with the tea, and I light the fire. I love Mrs Mandrake’s visits.
The warm feeling stays long after Mrs Mandrake leaves for her other errands, and even after Nan has disappeared again. Peg stays close, and after we’ve eaten all the chestnuts and about half the fruit loaf, I head out in a bit of a dream to set the charms.
The night sky is soft, stars flicker between scattered clouds over the moors, and the wind is singing through the silver wire. Peg has taken his true form for the night: a gleaming bronze imp with tiny red horns just above his ears, and curling, nimble hands and feet.
I love it when he’s just being an imp; I could watch him for hours. Only he doesn’t like it too much, being peered at. He bounds up now and sits on my shoulder and folds his arms and scowls, when suddenly the charms begin to ring.
‘What’re they doing in there?’ he mutters.
‘What they always do, I suppose,’ I say.
‘No. Nothing stays the same in there for long.’
‘I thought you went back in sometimes. You know, as our watch-bird?’
‘Watch-bird,’ he scoffs. ‘Well as to that, I did,’ he says. ‘For a long time. But it’s changed in the last weeks. It’s darker now, and I am not welcome. The shadows are everywhere. Most of the good folk spend their lives fighting or plotting escape.’
‘There’s a boy at school . . . I think maybe he lives in the forest.’
‘Don’t tell Nan,’ he says, but he doesn’t sound surprised. ‘She’ll worry. It’s one of the things I discovered, last time I was in there. Some families send their children to the school so that they get a human education and live in the human world, away from the forest. They started when the shadows took over, but only some are able: those who can pass for human, and those who are good at glamouring. I guess your boy is one of them, and Nan’s glamour does the job for you. For now . . .’ He looks me up and down, as if to check it’s still working.
‘I didn’t realize that was happening. Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘These things are for you to discover. You made your choice when you started at the school.’
‘And you were cross, so you thought you wouldn’t tell me something so important?’
‘Nobody ever said the school would be a safe place, Stella. Nobody said it would be a good idea. You decided to go anyway. And now you are discovering things for yourself. Isn’t that what you wanted?’
‘I always thought you’d tell me if something important happened in there. I know you like your secrets, but—’
‘But nothing. You need to use your own eyes, and your
own judgement. If I truly thought you were in danger, I would tell you. It was always a tricksy sort of place; now, even the skies are darker for it.’
I look at the sky over Winterspell and notice for the first time that the stars above are glowing red.
‘Shouldn’t we do something?’
‘You and I?’ He grins, his sharp teeth glinting. ‘And Nan? Against all the king’s army of shadows? We tried that, Stella. Your presence in Winterspell only made them fiercer. You’re doing what you can, with all your learning.’
‘That doesn’t help the fae in there, though.’
‘They are fighting,’ he says. ‘And mostly, they are winning. The fae have always loved a good battle.’
I stare into the gloom.
‘Aren’t we ever going to try again, then?’
‘Oh, we will,’ he says. ‘When the time is right.’
‘So for now, we just have to wait? I don’t know what we’re waiting for, Peg. It’s stupid to live so close when we can’t go in there.’
‘It is not stupid!’ He draws himself up with indignation, a spiral of smoke escaping his nostrils. ‘Nan’s power is connected to Winterspell; that’s why we stayed so close. And one day, the time will be right, Stella. You will go in there, and you will find the palace.’
‘Well let’s just hope that’s before the shadows have spread too far to be contained,’ I say with a shiver, a little bit cross and a little bit relieved. As much as I want to march in there and find that cursed palace and stop the shadows’ sprawl, the thought of fighting through them again is terrifying, and so is the idea of my Shadow King father. I cannot imagine ever feeling ready.
Peg doesn’t say anything, because there isn’t a right thing to say. We both know it’s happening. Young ash trees encroach further every season, their grey bark catching the moonlight and making stripes across the ever-diminishing moorland that stretches between the forest and our perimeter. And with them, come the shadows.