by Holly Race
‘Let us walk in the gardens,’ she says, looking around at the dreary room that’s been my prison for the last fortnight.
When we’re outside I expect her to launch into an explanation of how to use my Immral. As a Fay, she can’t manipulate people’s minds to the same extent as I should be able to, but she has a limited ability to change inspyre. Instead, she talks about her memories of Tintagel’s birth; how King Arthur pulled blocks from ancient rocks across the land and cemented them with the sap of the World Tree. She talks about the forge that once lay deep beneath Tintagel, where the Fay made the sword Excalibur to help King Arthur focus and strengthen his Immral. Then, at last, she stops me beside a fountain whose bubbling laughter masks our conversation from the prying ears of the apothecaries tending to the herb gardens nearby. It’s only when she turns to me that I notice some of the scars on her face have split open. Pearls of blood ooze from the wounds.
‘Why do you think you cannot use your Immral? Are you afraid?’
I shake my head. ‘I think it’s because I’m under so much pressure …’
Andraste cuts me off with a laugh. ‘Are you a knight, Fern King? Of course there is pressure on you. Any human who chooses the life of the thanes must endure emotions that would lay low any normal creature. You must embrace this pressure. Lord Allenby told me that you used your Immral to save a man’s life. If that is not pressure, what is?’
‘But I didn’t know –’
‘And now you do know. I thought better of you, Fern. You have taken knowledge and used it as an excuse to do nothing.’
‘Not on purpose!’
‘Then make me a dragon to slay.’
Andraste seems to grow taller as she takes hold of me and with one swing throws me over Tintagel’s wall into the streets that run alongside it. The shouts of the apothecaries and knights back in the castle’s grounds reach me as I flip midair to land on my shoulder and roll to a halt. I stumble to my feet and pat dust from grazed hands and knees. Andraste leaps the wall and lands beside me. ‘What are you doing?’ she says imperiously. ‘That is not dust, that is inspyre. It is your clay, your watercolour, your unhewn marble.’
I look down. Sure enough, the dust has turned back into blue light.
‘You see it, don’t you? Now feel it.’
I reach out one hand and the inspyre seems to vibrate against my palm, as though waiting eagerly for me to do something. I allow it to rest there, partly because I have no idea what to do next and partly because the vibration feels both calming and energising, like waking from a long sleep.
‘I feel it on my hand,’ I tell Andraste.
‘Now feel it here,’ she says, touching my forehead and my heart. ‘You are an artist, are you not? Think how you feel when you draw me.’
It’s been so long since I have immersed myself in an art project that I had almost forgotten the concentrated excitement, the sense of building something beautiful, layer upon layer, that would keep me up and working long into the night.
I push myself to sink into the soft, dark landing between awareness and raw inspiration. The inspyre in my hand flutters, and at the same moment I feel a twinge in my forehead. It’s working. The inspyre begins to move. It crawls like a centipede up my arm. No, not up my arm. In my arm. I can feel it crackling its way through tendons and muscles. Then it’s in my shoulder and reaching for my neck and …
Crack.
My brain is filled with inspyre. I can feel it exploring my imagination, skimming the surface dreams then swinging down into the recesses where the nightmares hide. The inspyre is bloating my brain and my skull cannot contain it. Beyond thought, I bash my hands against my head. I need to get it out – how do I get it out?
‘Open your eyes, Fern. Fern, open your eyes,’ Andraste is saying.
I open them.
The caged inspyre leaps forth from my skull, back down my neck, across my shoulder, through my arm and arcs from my fingers like lightning. It pools on the cobbles, taking form from my mind, taking the shape that most pleases it.
A baby, wrinkled and limp, flops towards us. Bulbous white eyes stare up at me. I have seen this creature once before, the night Andraste came for me.
‘Now make it go away,’ Andraste says. A keening noise rises from the baby’s lipless mouth. It flops onto its back and begins clawing at its eyes. I have to stop it. Panic paralyses me for a moment, then I remember what I have to do. I keep looking at the baby this time, my arm reached out towards it, sensing the inspyre that makes up the creature as though it is clay to be moulded. I can feel the motes of inspyre that pulse beneath the skin. They don’t just speak of muscle and bone; they speak of the baby’s soul. Malice, fury and stagnant vulnerability. I sense, too, as the baby continues to claw at its white eyes, what lies beneath those pale fruits. I draw back in horror, losing the connection between us.
‘I can’t,’ I tell Andraste. ‘Can’t I just leave it? Won’t it turn into something else when a dreamer comes along?’
‘You are a knight,’ is her only response.
Tentatively, I find the connection again, picking it up more readily this time, as though I had simply dropped the end of a thread. I push my mind inside the limp body and take hold of the hands, forcing them to stop clawing at its eyes. The keening ceases. The baby now watches me silently, its shrunken belly inflating and deflating with each laboured breath.
‘You need to go now,’ I tell it, reaching for the little body’s heart with my thoughts. Sadness washes over me, running back from the baby towards me. I had intended to press into the core of the inspyre, to pop it back into light, but at the last moment I twist my wrist instead. The inspyre convulses, spun and disorientated by my silent command. The baby seems to melt, its eyes rolling away like lychees. But the baby itself is reforming, heaving and frothing and unravelling. I can feel it all, at once audience and conductor, every movement reverberating up my arm and into my head. When the vibrations stop, the creature unfurls to reveal its new shape. A little red-haired girl stares at me with unbridled curiosity. Her eyes – one red, one blue – swirl hypnotically with the inspyre inside her. I smile at her. She smiles back. Then she turns and runs down the street, a threat no longer.
Someone sighs in relief, and I realise that it wasn’t me – it was Andraste. She looks at me warmly. ‘You did well,’ she said.
I wipe away the blood trickling from my nose and, trying to ignore my headache, walk back with her into the castle. Lord Allenby is standing on Tintagel’s steps, waiting for us. As Andraste hugs me goodbye, I think I spot her nodding at Lord Allenby, but the next moment I am sure I’m mistaken. It doesn’t matter anyway. Now I know how to use my Immral, we can all get to work.
26
It’s not long afterwards that we are assigned to our regiments. As Lord Allenby reads out our names, it’s obvious he’s listened to Emory, Rafe, Natasha and the other leaders about which people work best together. Ramesh, Phoebe and Ollie are assigned in quick succession to Bedevere. I wonder whether Bedevere’s real leader, the absent Samson, will approve of Rafe’s choices.
And then –
‘Fern King – Bedevere,’ Lord Allenby reads.
Oh. Phoebe squeezes my hand as I join her.
‘We got the Immrals, we got the Immrals,’ Ramesh sings as we all tack up.
‘Ramesh?’ Ollie calls from the other side of the stables.
‘Ols?’
‘If you call me “Immral” one more time I’m going to punch you.’
There’s a subtle difference in the mood between this excursion and the many other times we’ve shadowed a regiment. It’s as though we’ve been given permission to bond properly. Instead of practising formations or investigating suspicious inspyre activity, we’re taken on a tour.
‘We’ve got three hours tonight,’ Rafe tells us, ‘while the other regiments cover our patrol. Let’s make the most of it.’
We ride all the way across the city to Richmond Park, where unicorns graze alongside deer, th
en wind our way along the streams that cross the park. ‘Look!’ Ollie shouts at one point, his voice free of its usual sharpness. ‘Look at the water!’ And we follow his outstretched arm and see a huge pod of dolphins, their backs making archways in the shallows, keeping up with us, playing with us, telling us, This is your world too.
We stop in front of a magnificent Georgian lodge in the very heart of the park and let the horses graze on wild flowers. It’s there, as I watch Phoebe’s lion Donald trying to shepherd a pack of grumpy stegosauruses, that Lord Allenby appears on his horse.
‘It’s a fine day for your first outing as a regiment, isn’t it?’ he calls cheerily as one of the knights hurries to hold his charger. He dismounts and shakes Rafe’s hand.
‘What’s he doing here?’ Phoebe asks.
Ramesh rolls his eyes towards Ollie and I, but another knight, Amina, spots this and shakes her head. ‘He always joins the regiments for a bit when the new knights are assigned. It’s nothing to do with you two.’
But I’m not so sure that’s altogether true, because when it’s time to head back to Tintagel, Lord Allenby decides to ride next to me instead of at the front with Rafe. I am happily drained, grateful to be able to have a day off from the intensity of our Immral training and the headaches that inevitably accompany it, so I say nothing, hoping he’ll leave me in peace.
‘I still remember my first day out with Lancelot,’ he says after a while. ‘It was a brilliant feeling.’
‘Were you in the same regiment as my mum?’ I ask lightly. I know what the answer will be, but I want him to tell me about it.
‘I was. When I was given command of Lancelot there were just four of us.’
‘That’s quite small, right?’
‘It was unusual, to be sure. But I didn’t think we needed anyone else. We were an excellent team. Medraut had been leader of Gawain for a few years by that point, and he had a huge regiment, so it balanced out.’
‘Dad said that Mum never trusted Medraut.’
‘She didn’t. Nor did I, for that matter. But a lot of the thanes were taken in by him. There’s no shame in it. He’s a charismatic man, and he knew how to use his Immral to bring people round to his way of thinking.’
I think I know where Lord Allenby is going with this conversation, so I try to divert him.
‘At the monument to the knights killed by the treitre, I saw Mum had written a note to someone called Ellen. Was she in Lancelot with you as well?’
Lord Allenby darts a glance at me that I can’t decipher. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Ellen Cassell. Why do you ask?’
I’ve been reticent to tell anyone about Mum’s secret notes because I suspect that even coded messages about Annwn wouldn’t go down well with the thanes. I weigh it up, then I tell Lord Allenby about Mum’s messages in Ithr and the code Ollie found in his locker.
‘Ah yes,’ he says. ‘So your mother used that code in Ithr as well, did she? She invented it for our regiment, so we could leave secret messages to each other all over Annwn. All inconsequential, of course.’
Is it me, or did he sound nervous when he said that? We ride on in silence, crossing the Thames at a bridge festooned with lights, like a spider’s web covered in dew.
‘What did your mother’s messages say?’ Lord Allenby asks.
‘Oh, all inconsequential,’ I counter. ‘She talked about Ellen a lot.’
‘They were very close,’ he says. ‘Very different personalities, but they were well matched as friends.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, Una was very brave, very stubborn. Always got what she wanted. Ellen was more circumspect. She struggled in the knights to begin with. We tried to help her, your mother most of all. But … towards the end she was the most fearless of all of us. I know she would have put up a fight when the treitre came for her.’
‘You weren’t there?’
Lord Allenby shakes his head. I notice that one hand is bunched into a fist that he strikes against his leg as he talks. ‘She had taken another knight from Lancelot – Clement Rigby – to look into reports of a poisoner up in Whitechapel. It wasn’t supposed to be a dangerous mission. But neither of them returned.’
It occurs to me that there is one point where Lord Allenby might be able to set my mind at rest. The trouble is that if he and Mum were as tightly knit as he claims, then I might be accusing him as well. ‘We did find something in Mum’s messages,’ I tell him warily. ‘She said that she was a thief and a murderer – or that she might as well be. Do you know why she’d say that, sir?’
Lord Allenby’s face clouds over.
‘She wasn’t a murderer. None of us were.’
‘I didn’t mean –’
‘A dreamer died on our patrol,’ he continues. ‘It was dreadful, but it was an accident. Una was disciplined for it afterwards but that wasn’t fair in my opinion. These things happen sometimes, and we all have to live with the guilt.’
I notice he hasn’t explained the part about being a thief, but his tone makes it clear that follow-up questions will not be tolerated. We are nearly back at the castle now, and my former lightness has been thoroughly stamped on. As Tintagel’s towers come into view, Lord Allenby excuses himself and trots forward to join Rafe at the head of the patrol.
I don’t have much time to consider my conversation with Lord Allenby over the next few weeks because, with Ostara only a few months away, my nights are packed. Ollie and I are now asked to go to Annwn early so that we can practise our Immral before lessons begin. We have to excuse ourselves for bed just a few hours after getting home from school. Dad starts talking about taking us to a doctor for exhaustion and is baffled when my brother and I, speaking as one, insist that we’re absolutely fine. Those few hours each night are essential, because even though I now know how to use my Immral, my progress is slow. My excursions with Bedevere bring home how speedy I will need to be to defeat nightmares, but it still takes ages for me to sink into the right state of mind. I know everyone’s hoping that Ollie and I will be able to help the thanes hold off any attack from Medraut better than they were able to fifteen years ago. The extra fortifications installed in the wake of the discovery at the Globe now seem normal to me, and while other kalends have been discovered all over the country in Annwn, they have simply been assigned guards and nothing more has been said. The professionalism behind it all has muted the fact that Medraut’s power is clearly back to full strength – as far as we know he’s the only person alive who has the ability to make so many kalends.
Then, one night, we pause while training in the gardens, listening to the harkers shouting from the guardhouse. A straggle of knights from Dagonet is running, hunch-backed, across the drawbridge. Each one of them carries a bundle. Ramesh and I glance at each other before following the rest of our regiment to see what’s happening. As I get closer I realise that the bundles are actually dreamers. Some of them are so young they look as though they’re barely toddling in Ithr. The oldest clings to a walking stick.
‘What’s happened to them?’ Ramesh asks. I crane to see what their injuries are. On rare occasions dreamers are tended to in Tintagel after particularly horrible nightmares, to ensure that their wounds aren’t so bad that they’ll have an effect on them in Ithr, but I’ve never seen so many brought in at once. Then I catch sight of one of the dreamer’s faces and recoil. For where his mouth should be, there is only skin.
Apothecaries run down the steps to greet Dagonet, removing the dreamers from their arms and hurrying them into the hospital wing. Then one of the youngest, one of the few who still has her mouth, begins to scream. An arc of blood shoots from her open jaws.
‘He cut out her tongue,’ Phoebe says, turning away, her skin sheet white.
‘Who?’
‘Medraut,’ she whispers. ‘I overheard one of the knights telling the apothecaries.’
‘But … why would he do that?’ Ramesh says, looking as untethered as I feel.
‘To take away their voices,’ Ollie
says from behind us. ‘That’s what he does, isn’t it? When you really watch him in Ithr? He silences everyone else so that he can speak.’
No one who isn’t badly injured is permitted inside the hospital that night, as the apothecaries work to restore the dreamers’ tongues and mouths. A retinue of thanes lurks outside, eager to help, more eager for news. At one point the veneurs are called in to use the morrigans to remove the dreamers’ memories of Medraut’s torture. By the time the dreamers wake up, only a few have been cured. I am not one of those waiting outside, but I do pass by on my way to the stables and, when the door opens, spot the old woman with the walking stick. Her lips have been fixed, but they may as well have been painted on, for she is unable to move them at all.
‘It won’t look like anything’s changed in Ithr,’ Natasha tells us later, trying to comfort a distressed Phoebe. ‘It’s all in the mind, isn’t it?’
‘But something will have changed, won’t it?’ Phoebe says. ‘We know what he does. He’s taking away their voices.’
I can’t help but feel attacked. It’s my power that can do this to people – that can turn them mute in Ithr, or incapable of forming their own opinions. I want to tell her that not every Immral is like that – I’m not like that – but I don’t know how to say it in a way that doesn’t make all of this about me.
Where many thanes become timid and fearful with the reminder of Medraut’s threat, I am galvanised. I take to staying in Tintagel long after the thanes on the daytime shift have arrived, and return to Ithr with barely enough time to shower, grab my bag and run to the station. At the weekends, some of my fellow knights offer to stay and help me train too. It is Phoebe who laughingly cajoles me into morphing her so that she’s as tall as a tree. Rafe bowls cricket balls at my head that I must snap back into inspyre before they give me concussion. Ramesh chatters encouragement at me as I use my Immral to pull an old oak tree from the ground and then replant it, the soil crackling with inspyre as the roots reach for their usual resting place.