Ottilie Colter and the Master of Monsters

by Rhiannon Williams

  A huge tawny swamp harrier soared in through the window, circled and settled neatly on top of Bill’s head. The beat of its wings swept cool air across Ottilie’s skin. Bill didn’t appear to mind the weight of the large bird, or its needle-sharp talons resting over his skull. He reached out furtively, his finger stretching towards Maeve’s temple. Maeve swatted his arm away and snatched his hand in her own, offering her other hand to Ottilie.

  There they sat, all in a row, under a veil of silvery winter sunlight. Ottilie glanced sideways. Maeve and Bill had both closed their eyes. She wondered if it was really safe to let Maeve Moth into her mind, but her curiosity won out and, with only a hint of apprehension, she slid her eyes closed.

  First there was only soft warm light, and then an image surfaced. Gracie unconscious in the infirmary, white as the sheets that sheltered her, and a hooded figure standing above her bed.

  30

  Bird Tales

  It was dark in the infirmary. From the window, Ottilie could see only the back of the hooded figure, bending over Gracie. Gracie lurched and spluttered. Some liquid had been forced down her throat.

  Ottilie got the sense that the person was speaking, but she could only hear the low hum of a voice, no distinguishable words. Something was coming out of Gracie’s mouth. Ottilie saw it twirl upwards in the dim candlelight. It was like smoke, but unnaturally black for a cloud so thin.

  The figure stood up and began to turn towards the window. The image hooked and swung upwards as the swamp harrier took flight. Ottilie was about to open her eyes when the forest swam beneath her. The leaves swirled and there was a crack like a twig underfoot and a flash of light.

  The swamp harrier was somewhere different now. It was morning and the stormy dawn light had a greenish tinge. Thunder rumbled far off, but it wasn’t raining. Gracie was wandering through the trees beyond the boundary walls. She looked terrible. Her skin was greyish and her fair hair oily and lank.

  Ottilie saw two eyes flash in the bracken. Gracie stopped and stood very still. Slowly, a wyler prowled out of the undergrowth, fangs bared. Gracie looked over its head. The hooded witch was in the shadows, watching. Gracie held out her injured arm and removed the bandages. The wound was raw, swollen and oozing. Ottilie could see little black lines zigzagging under her pallid skin.

  The wyler stopped snarling and Ottilie thought she heard the hooded witch muttering a string of words like an incantation. Gracie bent down and extended her hand. She brushed the wyler’s matted fur, just once with her fingertips, and, like a snowflake, a single drop of white appeared on its fur. There was another crack of thunder and the white began to spread, like milk spilling – and the orange fur, the black feet, everything turned to white.

  Ottilie’s eyes snapped open. Hot panic was twitching under her skin. She had been wrong. Like everyone else, she was too quick to point the finger. She had been so eager for the mystery to be solved that she had tied it all to Gracie.

  But Maeve was right: Gracie wasn’t a witch. She had been lying in that infirmary, dying, and the hooded witch had done something to her, saved her from the venom and bound her to the wylers. Since then, that white wyler had grown as Gracie recovered. A month ago, it had been the size of a small horse. Who knew how big it was by now.

  It was different from the others – not just bigger, more alive. A bloodbeast, Ottilie was sure. She finally understood the meaning of the name. The wyler was bound to Gracie. It had become her kin – her blood.

  She had wanted it to be simple, for Gracie to be the sole villain, the witch who hexed the king and raised the dredretches and appeared just before disaster struck. But Gracie was just a minor player in a bigger game, and the real villain was still out there.

  Bill’s eyes were squeezed shut and he was shaking his head. The swamp harrier made a distasteful shrieking sound and flew off into the sunlight.

  Ottilie had the urge to call out ‘Thank you!’ but she restrained herself.

  Bill didn’t seem to have noticed the great weight lifting. ‘That was her,’ he said, fretfully twisting his fingers. ‘The girl I came to warn you about.’

  ‘I know, Bill,’ said Ottilie. ‘I told –’

  Maeve wrenched her hand out of Ottilie’s grip. Her eyes were still closed and Ottilie could see her pupils darting back and forth beneath her eyelids.

  ‘Maeve?’ she said.

  ‘She can’t control it,’ said Bill.

  Of course, Maeve said that her transformations mostly happened when she was asleep. Reading the memory, sharing it with Ottilie, she must have pulled too far away from consciousness.

  Maeve’s mouth began to stretch wide. Her hair stood on end. Ottilie remembered the cave paintings. This must have been what they depicted – the fiorns mid-transformation.

  Maeve’s eyes snapped open, twice the size they had been before. Her dress seemed to sink into her skin, feathers rolling to the surface in mesmerising ripples. There was a series of muffled cracks, like tiny bones breaking, and, with a wriggle and a snap, Maeve was gone and a great black owl swooped up to the rafters.

  Ottilie’s mouth was agape and her hands shook in her lap.

  ‘I’ll get her back,’ said Bill calmly.

  He went quiet for a moment. The owl had disappeared into a dark corner. Bill must have been communicating with her, because slowly, tentatively, she began to inch along the beam above their heads.

  Ottilie, out of instinct, got to her feet and held out her hand. It made no sense, of course, Maeve didn’t need helping down – she had wings – but Ottilie offered all the same.

  The owl hopped twice, shook its feathers, and was gone. In its place, clinging to the beam with terror in her eyes, was Maeve. Ottilie hurriedly found a barrel.

  ‘Bill, give me a hand,’ she said, and together they pushed the barrel across the floor, positioning it underneath Maeve. Bill flung his arms out, as if to suggest he would catch her if she fell, though he would probably have bent like a green twig if she had. Maeve let her feet dangle down and jumped onto the barrel.

  ‘Are you all right?’ said Ottilie, still recovering from the shock herself.

  Maeve was taking great gulps of air. ‘Yes,’ she managed. ‘It just knocks the wind out of me. Did you see everything we saw?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ottilie. ‘Gracie’s not the witch and it was a binding that saved her. That hooded witch was making a bloodbeast. But I don’t understand why she – it doesn’t explain why Gracie let it bite her in the first place.’

  ‘It’s just the sort of thing she did,’ said Maeve blankly. ‘She came from … not a nice place. She grew up in Longwood Forest, not far from the border to the Narroway.’

  Ottilie gasped. ‘The Laklander camps?’

  She couldn’t imagine living in that place. The Swamp Hollows folk had avoided even the outskirts. If Gracie had lived deep in the forest, near the Narroway border, without a ring to protect her mind – no wonder she was twisted.

  Maeve nodded. ‘Gracie was always different. She would do things … swim in icy ponds, jump from high places to see what would happen. She’d talk people into doing things like that with her.

  ‘She told me once, she knew how to fall without hurting herself. She’d done things to see what she could survive. She drank things, ate berries she knew she shouldn’t …’

  ‘But what if it killed her?’ said Ottilie, aghast. ‘Any of that, that wyler bite could have killed her if that person … that witch, hadn’t done that … hadn’t bound her to the wylers.’

  ‘She didn’t care,’ said Maeve, looking down at the floor. ‘She wasn’t scared of getting hurt. She was fearless. It was one of the things I admired about her. Or I thought I did.’

  This was the most disturbing thing Ottilie had ever heard. It wasn’t right. It was inhuman. ‘But she tested things on other people … she hurt other people.’

  ‘I never saw that. She didn’t do it to me. The only time I wondered was when Yosha Moses hit her head on that rock,’ said Maeve
, her voice weakening.

  Ottilie’s face ached from frowning. Something didn’t add up. ‘Maeve, I always got the sense that you knew things about me,’ she pressed. ‘That you knew I was a girl, back when I was pretending. How could you have missed so much about Gracie?’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Maeve, paling. ‘I just knew you were different and you were lying about who you were. I don’t know if I sensed it, or just saw it. I can’t have been the only one. But if it was a witch thing … well, Gracie never lied about who she was. There’s a lot I don’t know about her. But I didn’t share everything from my past with her either. She would dodge, or speak in riddles, but she never lied. You were lying, and I knew it.’

  ‘We have to be careful, the witch is still out there,’ said Ottilie, climbing down from Maestro’s pen later that day.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Leo. ‘We know she’s out there.’

  Maestro leapt over their heads to land on the slushy grass.

  She opened her mouth to try to explain that Gracie was not a witch, merely a foot soldier. But she couldn’t figure out a way to say it without implicating Maeve.

  She regretted ever mentioning that she thought Maeve was a witch, but back then she hadn’t been sure that Gracie and Maeve weren’t working together. Since the directorate had released Maeve, Leo hadn’t mentioned it, but Ottilie thought she caught him watching her more than he used to.

  ‘Stop thinking about witches,’ he said. ‘There’s a week left until the end of the hunting year. We need to focus on dredretches right now.’

  Ottilie’s stomach flipped. Soon she would be a second-tier, without a guardian. Leo could be a real pain but, despite everything, he was still her partner. Inside Fiory’s walls she might not trust him with her secrets, but beyond the walls she trusted him with her life.

  ‘I am focusing on dredretches!’ she said, striding over to where Maestro was stretching in the sun. ‘The witch is –’

  ‘What do you want from me, Ott?’ said Leo, walking beside her, kicking up twice as much mud. ‘I’m helping you with your little squad. What more do you need? You want me to go and find the witch for you?’ His tone was infuriatingly smug.

  ‘My little squad?’ She took a breath and calmed herself. Leo, as frustrating as he could be, cared a great deal about that squad. He loved teaching – mostly because he loved barking orders and showing off his skills. But Ottilie could tell that he really wanted them to be good. When Fawn hit the centre of the target he’d drawn on the barn wall, Leo lit up. Skip had become his favourite. She was excelling at everything, and Ottilie had heard him praise her more than once.

  He was only saying this to make her mad. It was tough, but she was gradually learning not to take the bait. Ned was a master at it. He had a way of putting Leo in his place without sparking an argument. She was trying to get better at it, but she lacked Ned’s patience. She also struggled with the idea that she had to do all the work to get along with him, and he didn’t have to change his behaviour at all. Even more maddening was the fact that Leo definitely treated her differently. He didn’t like it when she disagreed with him. Ned was allowed to have his own opinion. Ottilie, it seemed, was not.

  ‘Are you coming?’ said Leo, climbing into the front saddle.

  ‘I want to go in front,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I want to take the lead today.’

  ‘Ott, it’s a week from –’

  ‘The end of the hunting season, I know! You’re two hundred points ahead of Igor Thrike. I’m ranked twenty-second. You want me to focus on scoring points – let me catch up!’

  He grinned. ‘You’ll have more of a chance of scoring points if you let me lead. I’ll give you the big ones.’

  She didn’t react. ‘It’s my last week with you and Maestro, then I’m on my own.’ Ottilie had been trying not to think about it. It was bad enough worrying about the hooded witch without thinking about the new hunting year. She just wished she could be a fledgling a little longer! As of next week it wouldn’t be Leo’s job to teach her anymore – to watch out for her. She was going to have to learn to trust herself.

  ‘I want to catch up,’ she said. ‘But I want to do it myself.’

  Leo threw up his arms and slid to the back of the saddle.

  They were rostered to the alpine regions. With winter’s end approaching, the snowy blankets were growing patchy and pulling back higher and higher up the peaks. Ottilie could see spiky green bushes and the bright little heads of mountain flowers peeking through the shimmering white.

  She was looking for learies – like mountain lions but hairless, with thick, stony skin and a poisonous barb at the end of their tails. Ottilie had never hunted them before. She had only read about them, but she was determined to find one.

  Learies were tricky. They were perfectly camouflaged in rocky areas and could leap more than twenty feet in the air. But the danger was worth it. They were worth twenty-two points each, the same as a knopo.

  Ottilie dismounted to hunt for a trail. Leo and Maestro covered her from the air. Learies were light of foot, but their flicking tails left clues, little scratches and marks like burns on rock.

  After at least half an hour of searching, and much grumbling from Leo about wasted time, Ottilie spotted a singed scrape, and then two more. She signalled for Maestro to pick her up. They were fresh marks, all leading around the edge of a rocky escarpment. Maestro circled. Coming to a broad ledge, he dipped lower so that Ottilie could stay on the trail.

  A learie leapt out from under a hanging rock.

  Maestro lurched backwards in the air. The dredretch braced and bayed – a discordant, ear-splitting howl. Ottilie fired an arrow. It dodged, leaping down the steep rock face. Ottilie brought Maestro to the ground and flung herself from the saddle.

  The learie beat its tail against the rock. The stone sizzled and cracked. She fired another arrow. It dodged again. Its tail lashed out like a whip. Ottilie rolled on the ground and drew her cutlass. The learie pounced. She twirled and swung her arm behind her. There was a great crunch as her cutlass pierced its side, slipping through the rib cage to meet its mark.

  Ottilie pulled her blade free and watched the learie crumble to bone, the familiar hot black vapour trailing from its stinking remains.

  ‘You didn’t need to get down to do that,’ said Leo, frowning from above. ‘You put yourself in danger.’

  ‘I wanted to face it,’ she said, thinking of Ned – it’s more fun on foot, he’d said, closer to the action.

  She had wanted to feel it. This was something she’d learned from Gracie Moravec – there had to be a balance. Fearlessness was as dangerous as cowardice. Fear was important: it fed into instinct. Gracie had conquered fear, but to the point of dehumanising herself. She had offered herself to the monsters and become a creature to fear herself.

  31

  Champion

  In the final week of the hunting year, the rankings were wiped from the walls, feeding the mood of mystery and excitement that led to the winter’s end festivities.

  Ottilie had been so apprehensive about becoming a second-tier that she hadn’t expected to be too excited to sleep the night before. She surfaced from a dream well before dawn and spent the morning staring at the ceiling, wondering if she might finally have cracked the top twenty.

  That would be an achievement that no-one could deny. She was beginning to feel that she shouldn’t fear leaving the fledgling year behind. The scores would be reset after tonight. Ottilie would be back on even ground, and perhaps as a high-scoring second-tier she would finally be taken seriously.

  ‘What happens if no-one from Fiory makes champion?’ asked Gully, between messy gulps of his morning apple juice.

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Ned, approaching with his breakfast plate. He nudged his head in Leo’s direction. ‘This one’s been champion of my tier since we were recruited.’

  ‘Kidnapped,’ said Scoot, scowling down at his toast.

  �
��Haven’t you got over that yet?’ said Leo, laughing. ‘It only took me about a day to stop caring.’

  Ottilie doubted that was entirely true.

  ‘Nope,’ said Scoot. He still wasn’t himself. He was slower, sadder. He made other people laugh, but Ottilie rarely caught him laughing himself. ‘They’ll be bringing the new batch soon,’ he added bitterly.

  ‘Fledgling trials are at Arko this year,’ said Ned. ‘They’ll be staying there for a while.’ He settled into the empty seat on Ottilie’s left. She was very aware of how close he was sitting and noticed a strange tingling up and down her left side.

  She wondered when this had started. It was difficult to know; for the first half of the year, she had been nervous when anyone drew too near. Now, she was stuck in this wonderfully uncomfortable place, where all she wanted was to be near Ned but then felt unsteady and unable to meet his eye when she was. Particularly when nothing terrible was happening. At least when they were in danger Ottilie’s nerves were focused elsewhere.

  Her left ear feeling curiously hot, Ottilie turned away and directed her question to Leo instead. ‘Will you two be going over for the trials?’ She hadn’t thought about it before. For their trials, the elites from every station had come to Fiory to help them train and be paired up as guardians. Would Leo be going to Arko to get a new fledge? She would never admit it to him, but she couldn’t stand the thought.

  ‘We haven’t technically been named elites again yet,’ said Ned.

  Leo snorted. ‘We will be. But we don’t have to go this year. Fourth tiers get a year off from being a guardian. It’s why the fourth-tier champion always has the highest score of all the champions – he doesn’t have to share. That’ll be me next year.’ He looked sideways at Ottilie.

  She smiled, knowing full well she had hogged the best shots in that last week. But Leo had been hoarding points all year, so it was only fair.

  Ottilie was dressing for the champions’ ceremony when there was a knock on her door.