by Helen Slavin
The History classroom was empty save for Mrs McInnes marking a set of books. She looked up.
“Oh, someone’s coming in then.” She sounded weary. “I did wonder.” She glanced at her watch. Emz’s thoughts jangled and wouldn’t resolve themselves into action. She sat and reached into her Strength. It was calmer, so she tried to get a feel for what had happened. The web of gossiping voices, the sound it made, the violence of her Strength.
“Do you want to hand in the essay?” Mrs McInnes interrupted her thoughts. Emz rummaged in her bag for the papers, except they wouldn’t surface. All she could see were images of Logan Boyle, his hand on her arm at the turn of the stairs a few short weeks ago.
“Sorry.”
“You alright?” Mrs McInnes asked with genuine concern. Emz nodded; the contents of her bag rustled and shuffled and were uncooperative.
“This Logan Boyle thing is very unsettling,” Mrs McInnes said, chewing her lip. “You good friends with him?” she quizzed. Her tone was empathetic, not the vicious gossip of Mia and Katie or the mad burble of the common room.
Emz nodded, when in reality she had no notion of what her relationship was with Logan Boyle. What was she to him? She was not, she noticed, feeling anything in regard to the allegedly wronged Caitlin.
No one else turned up at the history lesson, and, after Mrs McInnes and Emily Way had exhausted the topic of the Chartists and the fight for universal manhood suffrage, Emz was dismissed and made a speedy escape in the direction of Prickles.
Or she attempted to. She was only half way across the yard outside the Humanities block when Tori, Keira, and Tasha exited the biology labs on the opposite side. There was no avoiding them and to turn back would be running away. Already she could see the web beginning to snaggle and wind as they approached.
“Emz, Emz…?” Tash was waving her hands in excitement as if flagging down a bus. “What the fuck is going on with Logan Boyle?” Emz was cornered.
“Why are you asking me?” she shrugged, and the look that she recognised from Mia and Katie flashed between this trio.
“Well. You know.” Tash was pulling an odd face, one of insincerity. “We all know you like Logan.”
Emz saw the knife of it, understood in one sentence how she was being drawn in.
“I don’t know anything.” She shrugged again, convincing no one. The group, no, the pack, Emz made the important distinction, shifted.
“You heard what happened?” Tori piped up from her spot at the rear of this hunting party.
“No, I didn’t.” Emz had not heard what had happened. She’d heard gossip and hearsay. The girls rounded on their prey.
“It’s tragic.” Keira was shaking her head. “Like, really fucking grim.”
“You know he’s at the police station? You know that’s why he’s not in school?” Tash was talking as if Emz was a toddler; one, Emz thought, who was about to be torn apart.
“Yes. Katie and Mia said.” The pack faltered a little at her lack of reaction.
“He raped Caitlin.” Keira dealt the killer blow. The web sang a high piercing note that joined with the starlight of her Strength. Emz felt odd, as if she ought to feel weak, but the energy flowed through her, swift.
“Left her for dead in Leap Woods. That old woman you work with found her.” Tori folded her arms.
“He fucking raped her.” Tash’s eyes couldn’t really get any gogglier. Emz looked at them. Her Strength was soaring, out beyond the idea of seeing real faces, further still to where the black web poured out of their mouths, tangled their hair. Did this black web signify the terrible news? The starlight of her Strength reached for the web and the two joined. Emz saw clearly.
“Were you there?” Emz asked. There was a ripple of shock.
“What?” Tori asked.
“What the fuck?” Keira was outraged.
“If you weren’t there, you don’t know what went on.”
The three girls were open mouthed. More web spooled out. Emz said nothing. Could she trust her Strength? Did she really know what she was doing?
“Caitlin told them he did it. Caitlin said he raped her.” Tash’s voice was hard. Keira took up the cause.
“They had a row on the way back from the party and he just raped her in the woods.” Keira’s real face was the most disturbing, as bland and featureless as a badly set jelly.
There followed a silence that could not be broken.
Emz was almost running to Prickles. Her mind was a roil of thoughts. She had not been in the loop for gossip for a long time. Once, she had been on Facebook and joined in with the group chats on WhatsApp, willing to chit chat and interact with the other girls, even the ones that she didn’t like. It had not mattered. She could put up with them for the sake of a social life, to fit in. She’d always disliked cliques and drifted from friendship group to friendship group with not much thought or commitment. She was a freelance friend, Caitlin had once joked. Emz had not cared, always having Prickles to escape to, and could gossip to Charlie about parties and trips to town.
Until that terrible Halloween a year ago when Calum and Ethan died, and the bottom fell out of the world.
It was not simply the loss. It was the faked grief and ghoulish interest of some of the members of the sixth form on social media. It had felt as if they were feeding off the tragedy, and she could no longer fake caring about them and their petty social concerns, the backstabbing and bitch-baiting. She cut herself off, and no one had come along to fetch her back.
Caitlin saw her as an amusement, like a cat with a mouse. Did Caitlin love Logan Boyle? Did she? The other question filled Emz’s head. Did Logan do this? It filled her head, left no room. She thought of the black web snaring everyone. Did she trust herself to understand its message?
Emz was tormented by the many images in her head of Logan and Caitlin and their exhibition kissing and, worse still, the terrible game at Tasha’s party, luring her out to witness Logan and Caitlin together in the summerhouse. Emz had been played, and these thoughts were a greasy slick in her mind.
It hurt. All of it. It hurt like a thorn in her heart, and she had too much pain to deal with. Calum and Ethan, Grandma Hettie. There had to be no room for Logan Boyle. She had cut him out of her heart.
She was in quite a state by the time she entered via the back door at Prickles. Winn looked taken aback by her appearance as she put down the phone.
“Good God alive, sit yourself down.” Winn pushed Emz into the saggy old armchair in the corner. “No arguments, you look dreadful. What happened? Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine.” Emz could barely breathe for the seething emotions. It was taking all her energy to hold back the tears. “I’m fine.”
“You heard?” Winn was straight to the point, her face a concerned frown. “That girl I found was from your school.”
Emz nodded.
“Good friend?” Winn asked, as she clicked on the kettle and fussed with tea things.
“What happened?” Emz asked.
“I told you. Found her in the woods bit the worse for wear, and I thought she’d tumbled off the horse. I called the ambulance. End of story.”
“She’s saying…” Emz found herself unable to say Logan’s name, “…she says one of the boys at school raped her.”
Winn was silent for a long moment. The kettle boiled with panicked breath.
“All I saw was the girl and the horse. I assumed she’d come a cropper, no more, and she said nothing to the contrary. I certainly did not see a boy.”
Emz nodded. It was not proof, it was not evidence of Logan’s innocence.
“He might, of course, have run away.” Winn made a case for the prosecution, and Emz scooped up all her thoughts. Tighe Rourke and Mrs Fyfe and all that Havoc Wood threatened seemed nothing beside this.
“Can’t find out who owns the horse,” Winn admitted. “I’ve rung round all my horsey pals and no one can even place it,” she sighed. “Since it wandered off into Havoc, I wondered if…”
“It�
��s our jurisdiction,” Emz nodded. “Don’t worry about it, Winn.”
And Winn nodded.
“Fine and dandy.” Winn’s voice was a little odd, but Emz did not register the difference. She was also glancing at her watch. “Well and good. Yes. Right. Fine.” The time on Winn’s watch was, of course, wrong, and so she glanced up at the clock on the wall. “I’ve got a meeting with the Wildwood Society committee in about fifteen minutes,” she announced. Emz looked at the clock.
“Shouldn’t you be on your way there then? It’s a good half hour to their offices.” Emz was glad of the mental distraction. Winn considered this for some moments.
“No need. It’s been, erm, rescheduled.” She patted her pockets, finding her phone in the left and a hedgehog in the right. Putting the hedgehog by the back door, she headed out into the education centre.
22
Call Me Ivan
Before breakfast, Charlie Way walked some of her more hidden paths to Banner Hill with a mind to tracking down the Great Grey Horse. It remained firmly out of sight, though, once she drifted out of her everyday thoughts, she caught scents of it in the wind here and there. A few hoofprints pressed into the mud made her halt and, as she touched the indentations, the path that had been taken lit up through the landscape. Except it led nowhere. Black velvet and sparkling with something like stars, it turned back on itself and pointed her back towards the shores of Pike Lake.
She made a mental note and then followed a curve of the trail up Banner Hill. Her fear, she noticed, was starting to curl back at the edges and she began to work out how to overcome it. Ignore it. Starve it. Whenever she felt most afraid, she determined to look in that direction as if the fear was a Waymarker.
Her calves stretched and aching, she turned to look back at Pike Lake from the top of Banner Hill. Her breath caught in her throat. There was not one path shimmering through Havoc, but a network. They curved back this way, stretched out long in that direction. At first, she thought it was the random wanderings of the Great Grey Horse, but finally she saw the pattern. It resembled nothing so much as a compass, as if the horse had written the points of the compass into the wood.
She felt the panic and fear rise, and, in doing so, blank out the compass. Charlie shut her eyes, took a step back. She inhaled the scents of the wood, used them to bank her fear, and opened her eyes. The compass was clear. What was this? The horse had clearly marked this out, but why?
She considered the direction of the compass points. Was it even orientated to a normal compass? She glanced across Woodcastle to get her bearings. Heron Step to the East. Yarl Hill to the West. Behind her, out of sight beyond the trees, was the southern ridge of Beacon Hill. This was North then, out towards Winter Hill. The compass that the paths had written into the wood was out of kilter in a way that she could not quite pin down.
Hurrying back to Cob Cottage, Charlie was eager to share her findings, but, when she arrived, Anna and Emz were already gone on their way, dishes draining by the sink. She scribbled as best she could on a piece of paper, anxious that her discovery would have to wait to be shared.
Charlie had sent a text already telling Emz and Anna, “Found compass point path for the Horse. Talk later” and wondered if it was too cryptic and would cause them both to panic. She’d made a start on trying to draw the compass points on a piece of paper and was doodling at this when Michael’s voice cut in.
“You’re aware that it’s a busy morning?” He sounded annoyed. Since Charlie had already been quite busy that morning with the latest delivery and the supervision of brewing, she wondered who he might be talking to.
She looked up from her compass diagram with the thought, That bit is wrong… drifting through her mind.
“Sorry?”
“I’m going over to see Midge Hills.” Michael had to talk to her, but he couldn’t look at her, his gaze concentrated on his tablet as he tapped at the screen. “And there’s been a change of plan.”
“What plan?” Drawbridge Brewery ran best on chaos in Charlie’s opinion. Michael looked up. She was aware of a disapproving glance at her workwear.
“You should smarten up.” He gestured to her jeans and Drawbridge t-shirt.
“I’m brewing beer, not walking a runway.” Charlie was sharp.
“Well, this morning you’re filling in for me with the Herald rep.” He raised a pompous eyebrow. “So… brush your hair or… or…” He had glanced at her hair and found it too taxing, and so he was looking away again. Charlie was hurt and wanted, more than anything, to put her tongue out at him or, worse, give him the finger. The name yelled out in her head.
“Wait, what rep from where?” Charlie was confused.
“The whole mess this morning is your fault.” Michael was already turning to leave. “You double booked the meeting with Midge Hills and the meeting with Tim at Montpellier.”
Charlie was losing her temper.
“Montpellier wants to drop us,” Charlie said. “They want the beer to be cheap and nasty, and we shouldn’t be dealing with them. They’ve been really shitty with the Knightstone winery.”
“Shitty they may be, but Drawbridge needs cashflow. They’re a good contract to have.”
“They pay late.”
Michael slammed down the tablet.
“I forget where someone made you the owner of this business. I’m now juggling them and Midge Hills and having to drive half way round Castlebury twice, so I think the least you can do is spend an hour sucking up to this Bettina Wright woman who’s coming from Herald.”
A bell tolled in Charlie’s head. Herald?
“What? Ivan Herald?”
“Yes. She rang last week. They want to increase their offer of locally supplied products, carbon footprint, etc, so they’re checking out the local microbreweries. Christ, do you ever listen?”
Charlie watched him. He was all edges this morning. She did not remind him that she had been the one to chase up all the leads in the last six months.
“I’m off.” He rattled his car keys out of his pocket. “Brush your hair, and don’t bollocks it up.”
He was gone with the slam of a door.
Half an hour later, Charlie, her hair resolutely unbrushed but a fresh t-shirt on, was waiting in the yard for the sleek black car carrying Bettina Wright to pull up. It was like awaiting royalty, and, as the tyres crunched over the yard, Charlie thought she ought to have a posy or a medal to hand. As she was amusing herself with this thought, the car door opened and, instead of Bettina, a middle-aged man got out. The cogs in Charlie’s head clicked into place, and, plastering her best smile across her face, she stepped forward.
“Good morning, Mr Herald.” She offered her hand. He took it warmly.
“How many times, Miss Way? Call me Ivan.”
Ivan Herald’s clean, strong hand caressed the belly of the mash tun.
“Where did Chance find this? Surely it wasn’t here already?”
“No.” Charlie was unaware of the charm being worked upon her. She had been lost in the brewery and its workings, the very last detail of which Call Me Ivan had been interested in and asked smart questions about. “No. This was a flour mill. Michael got this when they closed Toppers.”
The time had wandered by on slippered feet, and Charlie was talking about the brew and the malt and opening the workshop and revealing secrets and pouring samples and the words tumbled from her and fell upon attentive ears. She forgot the Mr Herald of The Ark and of Aron’s greedy ambition. She forgot his connection to Pandemonium, that palace of pleasure and beauty that was inextricably linked to her own grief.
She let go. She lost herself in hops and herbs and felt connected to another person. Not even Michael knew as much about brewing as Ivan Herald. Their laughter made the hot copper in the brewhouse ring like a bell, bringing light.
“You’re very passionate about this,” Call Me Ivan said.
“Oh. Thank you. Yes. I love my work,” Charlie confessed with a smile. Her mind replayed the toast he
had raised on the deck of The Ark as she had reached dry land. There was a scent of cigar and leather and crisp Irish linen that was heady and felt like home.
“I’m sorry, I’ve kept you overtime.” Charlie noticed the clock on the brewery wall. Call Me Ivan shook his head.
“No matter. This tour has been an education. Thank you.”
“Thank you. I mean, you know your stuff and you’re…” Charlie felt a hot blush light up her face as his eyes met hers. She was gushing, being unprofessional, and, as Michael had warned, probably bollocksing it up. She swerved back onto track. “And, just to be businesslike, Mr Chance will be back in the office after 2:30 if you need to call and ask him anything.”
“I think you’ve covered all my questions. It’s been a pleasure.” They shook hands once again. His smile was easy and genuine, his eyes, she noticed, green-flecked with brown, exactly like the hazel in Havoc Wood.
23
Cats and Cards
It had not been a great morning at the Castle Inn. There had been a fractious discussion after Casey attempted to make Lella spill the beans about the sale of the inn.
“Just because you don’t like Ivan Herald.” Lella was flustered. Casey was defensive.
“I didn’t say I didn’t like him. I asked if you’re selling up.” Casey stood her ground. “A question that you haven’t answered, by the way.”
Lella fudged it.
“I like him. The man has single-handedly regenerated Castlebury. He sees potential.” There was a desperation in her voice that Anna didn’t like to hear, and so she was grateful for the unexpected sound of bustle and custom in the restaurant.
Students from the EFL Academy in Castlebury had taken a walk along Rook’s Ridge from Blackstone Height and arrived in need of emergency rations. Lella was curt.
“Lunch just finished.” She shook her head to the weary-looking tutor. Anna was on her way to her own break.