Dark Tree Shining

by Paula Harrison

  Laney leaned round to look at the leaf-man’s head. The blankness of it made her stomach turn over. “I don’t think it has senses. It doesn’t even have a face.”

  The leaf-man went on stirring in a steady rhythm. Steam curled up from the bubbling purple liquid, its transparent shape coiling as it rose into the air. It reminded Laney of something else that belonged to Gwen. “You know what? Gwen’s got something that might help us.”

  “She didn’t want to give us another adder stone,” said Fletcher. “She wanted us to keep on searching together.”

  “I don’t mean the adder stone,” said Laney. “I’m talking about something that will show us where the Myricals were hidden in the first place.”

  Laney crouched down and opened a cupboard by the leaf-man’s knees, trying not to touch him. Close up she could see all the tiny leaves that made up his legs. They weren’t even held together by anything and yet they moved as one as he bent forwards to stir the stuff inside the copper pan.

  “What are you looking for?” said Claudia.

  “Hold on.” Laney peered into the darkness of the cupboard. Beside the sieves and saucepans was a brass weighing scale. The shelf above was filled with an odd collection of coloured bottles with faded, handwritten labels. She picked out a small, dark-blue bottle and held it up to show them. “I’m sure this is the right one. See! We can look at the Spirit Smoke!”

  Gwen had used the Spirit Smoke six weeks ago to show the ancient story of the five faerie tribes and how they’d come to live among humans. Laney had no idea how it worked, but she’d thought of it a lot since then – the shapes and colours of the smoke had been so beautiful.

  “Laney! We can’t touch that,” Fletcher told her. “Only the Elders ever use it. We don’t even know what to do with it.”

  “How hard can it be?” said Claudia. “And if it can show the story of the first faeries, why can’t it picture other times from our history too? We can ask it to display exactly where the Myricals were hidden. I think it’s a brilliant idea.”

  “You would!” said Fletcher. “But if the Spirit Smoke had all the answers, don’t you think Gwen would have used it already?”

  Laney straightened up, frowning. “I still think we should try it. It can’t hurt.” She looked at the leaf-man, half afraid she’d see something on his blank face or sense a change in him to show that he’d heard what they were planning, but he just kept stirring steadily. Holding the bottle tight, she went into the plant house.

  “It’s a mad idea,” said Fletcher, following her with Claudia. “What if Gwen comes back?”

  “She said she wouldn’t be back till morning, remember?” said Claudia. “Here, I’ll hold it while you pull out the stopper.” She took the bottle in both hands.

  Laney’s heart raced as a thin, grey smoke began to curl from the mouth of the bottle. It quivered in the green light of the plant house and then spread slowly outwards, filling the air with its haze. As it unfurled, it turned from grey to a mass of glowing colour.

  Laney drew her breath in quickly. “What does Gwen do next?” she whispered to Claudia.

  “I don’t know! Try commanding it or asking a question,” suggested Claudia.

  The colours hung in the air … glowing … waiting.

  Laney straightened her shoulders and tried to speak with confidence. “Take us to the time when the Elders hid the Myricals from the Great Shadow.”

  Slowly, the smoke gathered into shapes and lines, and a scene formed in the air. A scene of chaos. People ran in all directions. Parents snatched up their children. Wind tore through trees ripping branches from the trunks, while smoke billowed from the windows of a burning house. Then the sky darkened and people opened their mouths in soundless screams as a figure with black-edged wings descended, blasting white lightning from both hands.

  Laney felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck. She didn’t need to hear their cries to understand their fear. This had to be the Great Shadow – a faerie of immense evil who had terrorised the tribes before she was born. He was smaller than the Shadow faerie she’d met in her fight for the Crystal Mirror and he had blazing white eyes – blank at the centre with no dark pupils. Laney heard Claudia draw her breath in sharply. The terrifying, blank eyes came closer and closer, until Laney was afraid that the Great Shadow could see them – even through Time itself.

  Then the smoke curled and shifted, changing the scene, and the white eyes vanished. A new scene gradually took shape. A group of adult faeries sat round a large table talking earnestly. Laney got the sense from their clothes and their manner that they belonged to different tribes.

  “My dad told me that the Great Shadow rose thirteen years ago,” Fletcher murmured. “Those must have been the Elders in charge at the time.”

  The smoke moved and the Elders got up from the table and left the room. One lady stayed behind. She crumpled a bright-yellow leaf and wove a spell in the air that spiralled outwards in expanding circles.

  “That Thorn lady looks a little bit like Gwen,” said Claudia, “except her hair is different.”

  The lady looked round warily and for a second Laney thought she’d heard them. Then she reminded herself that all this had happened before she was born. Everything she was watching was already frozen in Time.

  The scene switched again – this time to a long avenue of silver birch trees. A tall man with a wild beard strode down the avenue. He carried a polished wooden arrow with a shining silver tip in both hands. The smoke pulled in sharply to show every detail of the arrow, from the feathers on the shaft to the shining arrowhead.

  “That’s the Wildwood Arrow!” Fletcher leaned forward. “I’ve seen it before in books but this is so clear.”

  Laney thought that the arrow – the Thorn Myrical – looked amazing. “He must be the Thorn Elder, going off to hide the arrow. See – I knew this would work!”

  “Only a Thorn would grow a beard like that,” said Claudia.

  The tall man marched between the two long lines of silver birches. As he passed, each tree shot upwards, growing taller, greener and more alive.

  “Look at how the arrow’s changing the trees,” said Laney. “It’s like a ripple of energy. The power coming from it must have been huge – not even Gwen makes the plants grow like that.”

  The man swung round suddenly, as if hearing a noise behind him. Then all the smoke turned yellow and the picture disappeared.

  “Where’s it gone?” said Claudia. “It’s like looking at a TV when the picture’s gone fuzzy.”

  “We must be able to get the image back. I need to see the Arrow!” Fletcher moved in closer until his face was almost touching the vapour, but the smoke hung blankly in the air without moving.

  “I thought you said this was a mad idea?” Laney said.

  “I know I did, but the Arrow … it’s the Thorn Myrical and it’s got all of my tribe’s power inside it. I just wanted to see it a bit more.” Fletcher threw himself down on to the garden bench and a leafy vine curled consolingly along his shoulder.

  Claudia prowled around the unmoving cloud of Spirit Smoke, looking at it from all angles. “Something’s blocking it, like a jammed signal. I guess we’d better stop now.” She uncorked the bottle again and held it up. The smoke curled downwards, sucked towards the deep-blue bottle like water to a plughole.

  “Wait!” Fletcher got up from the bench and put his hand over the top of the bottle. “We should try to learn more about the Myricals themselves. Any extra information could help us with our search.” He spoke to the smoke. “Go back hundreds of years and show us the Myricals from when they were made.”

  Straight away, the Spirit Smoke formed each shining Myrical in turn. Laney recognised the first as the Mist Myrical – the Crystal Mirror that shone like a thousand stars. She felt a flush of pride, remembering how she’d held it and felt the Mist power inside.

  Next came the Sparkstone belonging to the Blaze tribe – a misshapen grey rock with a pitted surface. Laney couldn’t he
lp wondering why the tribe with power over fire had chosen a rock that looked so dull and lifeless. She stared at it, wondering.

  After the Sparkstone came a slim-necked, transparent bottle. This was the Vial of the Four Winds belonging to the Kestrel tribe. As Laney looked closer, she could see something moving ceaselessly inside the bottle and she wondered if it really was the heart of the four winds.

  “The White Wolf!” Claudia exclaimed as a small animal figurine appeared. The pale statue showed the wolf tipping back its head in a howl, its eyes golden-ringed like a faerie’s.

  Lastly the Wildwood Arrow emerged from the shifting colours of the Spirit Smoke, its honey-coloured wood gleaming. Laney glanced at Fletcher, who was gazing raptly at it.

  Then, one by one, each faerie tribe appeared, took their Myrical and gathered round it, filling it with magic so dazzling that Laney had to shade her eyes. The faeries held the objects aloft, each filled with the essence of their tribes.

  “That must have been some spell,” breathed Claudia. “Just look at them.”

  Laney knew what she meant. The faerie tribes, in their ragged medieval clothes, looked triumphant. Their joy shone across the Time gap of hundreds of years. It made her feel so sad that the Myricals had been lost and all that happiness had come to nothing.

  She spoke to the Spirit Smoke. “Can you show us the Myrical that was hidden closest to Skellmore?” The smoke quivered and returned to swirling colour. Laney’s shoulders sagged; perhaps it didn’t know.

  “Try changing the question,” said Fletcher. “We could ask—” He was cut off by a loud noise from the kitchen that sounded like a saucepan falling on the floor.

  “The leaf-man!” cried Claudia, and she and Fletcher sprinted out of the plant house.

  Laney stayed by the Spirit Smoke. “Is he OK?” she called out to her friends.

  “It’s all right, he’s just stopped working,” Fletcher said from the other room. “It’s like he suddenly forgot what he was supposed to be doing. So much for him working till morning.”

  Laney stared at the smoke, her mind spinning. There was one more thing she was desperate to know and she wanted to ask the Spirit Smoke without the others listening. After the way she’d made the lake water boil today, it seemed more important than ever.

  She had to find out … not just if something was wrong. But if something was wrong with her.

  She cleared her throat. “Why did I make the lake water boil at Mist training?”

  The Spirit Smoke formed a picture of Faymere Lake at sundown. Laney saw herself – a figure on the shore – and watched the water boil and the strange black lumps float to the surface. She squirmed, remembering that moment and the looks of the other Mist kids. But this wasn’t telling her anything new.

  A movement caught her eye as the smoke wove a different pattern into the scene. A red disc emerged slowly, as if it was coming out of the lake itself. Her eyes followed its crimson shape as it climbed into the night sky and kept on rising.

  A blood-red full moon. The Wolf Moon that had appeared over Skellmore on the night of her Awakening.

  For a second, she couldn’t breathe. But the moon hadn’t been that colour when she was at the lake for the training – it hadn’t even been a full circle. How could the Spirit Smoke be so wrong?

  Unless … maybe it was trying to tell her something else. Something about herself. She had just asked it why she’d made the water act so strange.

  Laney vividly remembered the Wolf Moon glaring down that night as faerie enchantments had surged through her and her eyes had become golden-ringed for the first time. Many faeries were deeply suspicious of her because she’d Awakened under a red full moon. Such a moon was supposed to be a sign of terrible things to come.

  There was an old faerie prophecy about someone born under a red moon who would cause chaos and disaster. The moon was not red the night of Laney’s birth, but still the shame of that moon appearing when she Awakened seemed to follow her.

  She glanced at the doorway. The others were still talking in the kitchen. There was time to ask another question without them hearing. She moistened her lips. She had to know what the connection was. What did the red moon have to do with her? “Show me the night I Awakened – the night of the Wolf Moon.”

  The smoke swirled. She saw her old self – a human with blue eyes, standing in her kitchen laughing with Kim and Toby. On the table was a birthday cake that spelled out her name in Smarties. She saw her dad come in, angry that they had lit the candles on the cake – he hated candles and matches, and would never allow them in the house. She watched herself blow out the candle flames with a sulky face. Then the picture shuddered and vanished as the smoke coiled itself up into a tightly shaped spiral. Faster and faster it twisted, climbing upwards until it had almost reached the glass roof. Then, with a burst of light, it exploded.

  Laney was thrown backwards on to the hard tiled floor of the plant house. She thought it was raining until she realised that bits of leaves, flowers and bark were showering over her.

  “Laney?” Claudia was crouching beside her in seconds. “Are you OK? What was it? Did you ask it to show you a faerie battle or something?”

  Laney let go of the bench she was gripping on to and touched her forehead. “Ow – my head.”

  “What did you do?” Fletcher gazed round the plant house in horror.

  The plants had been bent over by the blast. Branches hung broken on some of the trees. Flowers lay crushed and the fallen leaves made a ripped green carpet across the floor. The Spirit Smoke had vanished leaving no wisps of colour behind in the air.

  Laney got up, her head thumping. “What’s Gwen going to say?”

  “She’s going to ask us why we trashed her house and why we took the Spirit Smoke without permission. I just hope she doesn’t set a carnivorous plant on us. Where’s the Spirit Smoke gone? I’d better put it away.” Fletcher uncorked the blue bottle and scanned the air. “Laney – where is it?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s disappeared.” Laney couldn’t bear to look up at their faces. “I asked the Spirit Smoke to show me the night of the red moon. That’s when it burst.” Laney realised her hands were shaking. “Just showing me the night I Awakened blew it up. What does that say about me?”

  “I don’t believe in that red moon prophecy nonsense.” Claudia swept the shredded leaves off the bench and sank down on to the seat. “None of us Greytails do.”

  Laney shook her head miserably. “Something happened at Mist training. I didn’t want to tell you before.”

  “Go on. What is it?” said Claudia.

  Laney swallowed. “We were practising raising drops of water from the lake and at first I found it really hard. I was worse than the other beginners and then … everything went wild. The water heated right up and started boiling. I’m not even supposed to be able to do something like that yet. Lucas Frogley was furious. What if I’m cursed somehow?”

  “But in the prophecy, the person bringing bad luck is born on the night of a red moon and you weren’t, were you?” said Fletcher.

  Laney put her hands in her pockets. “No. And Dad showed the Elders my birth certificate too.”

  “Then don’t worry. You probably just spoke to the Smoke in the wrong way. Or maybe it’s not supposed to stay outside the bottle for so long.” He touched a half-broken branch of a tree; the split healed up and the branch straightened again. “Let’s clear this place up before Gwen gets back.”

  Claudia fetched some Thorn elixir from the kitchen and began watering random plants with it, while Fletcher walked around, touching damaged plants and whispering to them till they healed. Laney found a broom and swept up the fallen leaves. She dreaded what Gwen was going to say. These plants were so precious to her.

  “That’s better.” Fletcher pushed back his dark fringe. “I’ll just check the leaf-man in case he’s forgotten what to do again.”

  But the leaf-man was still standing by the copper pan, stirring with the same steady r
hythm.

  They heard the chime of the church clock. It was midnight.

  “The worst thing is, we still don’t know anything more about where the Myricals might be hidden,” said Claudia as they closed the front door behind them.

  “I told you it wouldn’t be that easy, or Gwen would have already done it,” said Fletcher. “There’s no quick way to find them. No quick spell or cheat’s way out. We just have to keep going with the adder stone and mark each place on the map as we check it.”

  Claudia pulled a face behind Fletcher’s back, making Laney smile faintly. “The mess was my fault,” she said. “I’ll come back in the morning and apologise to Gwen.”

  Fletcher pulled the adder stone out of his pocket and flipped it, letting it spin in the air before catching it again. “See you tomorrow.”

  Laney looked at her clock when she woke the next morning. The hands stood at quarter past seven. Usually, with only a couple of days left of the holidays, she’d be trying to have a lie in. But lately it seemed more and more important to spend every minute on the hunt for the Myricals.

  She sat up, her mind running over everything that had happened the day before. The boiling lake water … the red moon in the Spirit Smoke…

  She was sure she was missing something – a connection between them. The images circled inside her head like a movie playing in the wrong order. Shaking sleep away, she climbed out of bed and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt.

  Delving in the bottom of her chest of drawers, she took out a pale-blue notebook. Kim had bought it for her as a diary a couple of Christmases ago, but she could never be bothered to write in it every day. She leafed through blank pages interspersed with the occasional scribble and stopped at the back page.

  This was where she had written it down. This was the prophecy of the red moon as expressed in faerie lore. She read it silently.

  Born under a Wolf Moon, the Child of Aether joins together powers far apart. He binds the opposites and drives a splinter through the faerie ring’s heart.