Aurora

by Julie Bertagna

  Suddenly Scarwell appears above her, on a ledge.

  Mara steadies her nerve. The eyes of the young wolfwoman watch her every move as she hauls herself up on to the ledge, sweating and breathless. Mara raises the torch and sees the wolves perched, still as statues, on the rocks all around.

  ‘What’s our fight this time, Scarwell?’ Mara demands. ‘What is it you want? Why hit out at Lily just to get at me? I know you did. Scar, if it wasn’t for me, you’d still be in the netherworld – maybe dead by now. Why such hate?’

  Scarwell was a child still when Mara, barely older than Lily, found her in the netherworld – a ferocious urchin, abandoned by the world, fighting to survive among the rooftops and land scraps in the drowned city. Mara touches her cheek in an unconscious gesture, remembering the long-faded wound that Scarwell once gave her that, in turn, gave the wolfwoman her name.

  Scarwell stares, the memory sparking in her eyes too.

  ‘Always you take,’ Scarwell spits out. ‘Once, my urchins all mine. Wing all mine. Then you come to netherworld, take us all away on ships. Take my urchins to Candlewood.’ Scarwell bares her blackened teeth. ‘World is not all Mara’s. Wolf Mountain mine.’ Scarwell stamps her foot on the ground. ‘Girl is like you,’ she mutters. ‘She takes.’

  ‘Lily? Takes what?’

  But the instant she asks, Mara knows. Lily takes Wing. She takes him whenever she can. All summer long, Wing comes down to live by the lake close to Lily. Now that Lily is no longer a child but a striking, fiery young woman, she threatens Scarwell’s bond with Wing.

  ‘Is Lily here, Scar? Is she with Wing?’

  Desolation flits across the wild beauty of Scarwell’s dirty, battle-scarred face.

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘Gone?’ Mara repeats.

  ‘Gone away. Gone.’

  The lake and its mountains seem to swoon out around them in a vast emptiness. In that moment Mara feels the world as Scarwell must, as a place of constant loss.

  ‘Help me, Scar,’ she pleads. ‘You want Wing back. I want Lily. Tell me where they’ve gone.’

  The dread Mara has been keeping at arm’s length wraps around her now, cold as a ghost.

  ‘To find Fox,’ Scarwell hisses. ‘Gone to sea!’

  PHANTOMS AND LEGENDS

  Mara gusts cold air into the burrow as she bounds down the steps. Rowan stares as she grabs her old backpack from the bottom of a large store cupboard dug deep into the curving wall of the burrow.

  ‘Didn’t you find her? Mara, where have you been? It’s been dark for hours. The kids have been wanting you . . . wait, what are you doing?’

  Rowan prises the backpack from Mara’s freezing fingers and holds her close until he feels her shuddering panic soothe.

  ‘Pollock and I will search Wolf Mountain the second it’s light,’ he says.

  ‘I’ve already been.’

  ‘To Wolf Mountain? Alone?’ Rowan breaks his embrace, exasperated. ‘Mara—’

  ‘I had to. But she’s not there.’

  Mara sees the scrap of wood-pulp parchment on the table covered in Lily’s angry charcoal scrawl and seizes it.

  ‘I found it on her bed,’ says Rowan. ‘Can’t make much sense of it, but at least she’s with Wing.’ Yet his doubts about the wolf boy are clear on his face. ‘There’s nothing we can do tonight.’

  ‘Wing is wild and she’s still a child and—’

  ‘I know, Mara, but think of what you did at Lily’s age.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m thinking of! Lily’s just as headstrong as I was.’

  ‘Still,’ Rowan retorts, as Mara takes up her backpack once again and begins to stuff it with provisions: a leather water flask, a pack of dried fish, a chunk of nut loaf.

  ‘Some pine spirit for wounds,’ she murmurs. ‘She could be lost in the mountains, injured . . .’

  ‘Stop panicking.’

  Mara isn’t listening. She digs deep into the bag, unzipping its inner compartment. Rowan watches her rummaging, his face darkening.

  ‘What is it you’re looking for? That cyber-whatsit?’

  ‘It’s gone,’ Mara cries. ‘Granny Mary’s wooden box – it’s where I keep the halo from the cyberwizz. They’re both gone. Lily must have taken them. But the halo is useless without the globe.’

  ‘What does it matter?’ Rowan slumps down in a chair.

  The cyberwizz always annoyed him when they were young because it took Mara to a place he couldn’t follow: into the Weave, a mysterious virtual world she never let him see. There were too many secrets to do with the wizz that she always kept to herself. Mara knows Rowan was secretly relieved once the globe was lost.

  ‘Wait a while,’ Rowan urges in a gentler tone. ‘Give her time.’ He pulls Mara towards him. ‘Let her have her own adventure, Mara. Let her be. We don’t know where she is, anyway. She’ll come back.’

  ‘Her own adventure?’ Mara’s smooth brow crinkles in bewilderment.

  ‘Have you never thought,’ Rowan challenges her, ‘what it’s like for her, growing up surrounded by tales of the legendary Mara? It’s bad enough for me.’ He breaks into a grin that softens his face into the boy Mara grew up with on their drowned island. ‘Maybe she just needs to escape your shadow for a while.’

  ‘She’s not in my shadow. She’s far too bright for that.’ Mara pauses. ‘Though I remember Mum felt like that about Granny Mary.’ She rakes her long, dark hair back from her face in a fretful gesture of old. ‘But that’s not why she’s gone.’ She falters, swallows hard, ‘Scarwell told Lily about . . . about . . .’

  Mara stops, the name freezing on her lips. She has barely spoken it in all the years Lily has been alive. She’s not quite sure why, although she knows something in Rowan flinches from the very thought of that other presence, the one who is part of Lily and flutters like a tree-ghost at the edges of their lives.

  ‘The legendary Fox.’

  Rowan finishes the hanging sentence in a flat voice.

  Mara wants to escape his piercing blue eyes but they pin her to the moment, as always.

  ‘You’ve had all the time in the world to tell her. Years, Mara. She should have heard it from you. You should have told her the truth in the beginning.’

  ‘I tried . . . I . . .’

  ‘Once. You tried once.’

  ‘She wanted you to be her dad. You love each other. I couldn’t bear to spoil that.’

  ‘Maybe what you couldn’t bear is to talk about him. You can’t even speak his name.’

  Silence falls between them.

  ‘Scarwell says,’ Mara tries to steady her shaking voice, ‘that Lily has gone with Wing to find him.’

  ‘To find him? Fox?’

  Rowan, stunned, reaches out to stop Mara as she pulls on her parka and slings her backpack over her shoulder.

  ‘I’ll go,’ he grabs her arm. ‘I’ll find her. The children need you here, Mara. Our children, fast asleep in their beds, who will wake up wanting their mother.’

  ‘Our children have their father.’

  ‘So has Lily.’ Rowan’s ice-blue eyes burn into hers. ‘Right here.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers, but turns away.

  The thought of leaving the little ones is unbearable. She hesitates for an anguished moment then stumbles up the wooden steps and pushes open the burrow door.

  The wind wrenches the door from her fingers. Mara climbs up out of the burrow and the wind bangs the door shut again at her feet. She stands alone in the forest. The wind sobs through the pines and swooping owls hoot like lost souls. Everyone else in Candlewood is below ground, like all the other forest creatures. Only the lamps among the trees puncture the dense black night Even the glittering map of the stars is blanked by cloud.

  Dread grips Mara as the warmth of the burrow seeps from her.

  The bang of the door has woken little Coll. Rowan will try to soothe him but the toddler’s cries of Mummy penetrate the floor of earth between them, tugging at Mara’s insides as if he is b
onded to her with invisible strings. It’s her arms he wants, her scent, her hair twirled around one thumb as he sucks noisily on the other. Mara’s body aches; she feels torn in two.

  Rowan is right. She can’t leave.

  Mara tries not to think of all the calamities that might befall Lily in this abyss of night. An owl screeches like a terrified girl and the wind-frittered tree lamps play tricks with her tear-blurred eyes, as Mara seems to see a flame of hair streaming through the forest like the fiery phantom of a fox.

  WHERE THE SUN FELL TO EARTH

  Her deerskin boots are a splattered mess. She’s been sick all over her own feet.

  Trembling, Lily pulls a water pouch from her pocket and takes a sip only for her stomach to heave again and again, until she fears she’ll turn inside out. Head thumping, she slumps back against a rock and tries to make sense of the unfamiliar shapes of the mountains.

  Where is she?

  ‘Wing,’ she whimpers.

  He was with her, wasn’t he?

  It’s all such a blur.

  A shadow looms over her and Lily yells with fright. But it’s only Wing, looking down at her, perched on the rock above.

  Lily stands up, unsteadily. The world spins.

  ‘Lil!’

  Wing’s shout breaks into endless echoes. Lily slumps back against the rock with a gasp as she sees the plunging abyss, a few steps away.

  An immense gorge lies between the mountains. Ice sparkles in its depths. Chunks as big as icebergs sit marooned like stranded ships waiting to set sail in the spring meltwater that pelts down from the mountains.

  The sun balances on a peak at the faraway end of the gorge and it seems to Lily that once, in a time out of mind, the sun must have toppled from that mountain and crashed down to Earth, gouging out the wide gorge before bouncing back up into the sky, leaving this brutal wound in its wake.

  ‘Where are we?’ she croaks. ‘How did we get here?

  Wing gives her a dry look and chucks an empty leather flask at her. Lily catches the aroma of pine resin as the flask lands in her hands and feels her stomach heave again.

  Groggily, she begins to remember.

  The flask of pine wine, stolen from the winter store.

  The lovely, dizzy, soaring feeling as she hid deep in the trees, ignoring all the worried voices calling Lily, where are you? Lily, come home!

  She’d gulped the oily, aromatic wine until everything felt woozy. Nothing hurt, nothing mattered. Anything was possible. She might jump off Candlewood spire and land on a star, or sail to the furthest shores of Lake Longhope and explore the distant, unknown Northern reaches with the reindeer – or run away to the world’s ocean to find her real father and make everyone suffer for lying to her all her life.

  The moon hung like a lamp in the sky and she’d followed it past Candlewood Spire into a landscape of giant, bleached rocks that looked as if they’d dropped from the moon. Now, here she is, among the ferocious peaks of the southern mountains, with a head like a thunderstorm.

  Wing must have tracked her every staggering step.

  Lily shrieks as he smashes an ice-bomb over her head. Wing jumps down beside her and scrubs her face with ice until she’s gasping, then mushes a handful down her neck for good measure. It does the trick. Her face stings but her head is clearer. Now Wing hands her his drink pouch. Lily’s stomach heaves at the scent of pine mixed with the musky wolfskin pouch. But tree bark tea is not pine wine. She sips the cold, bitter drink and feels her queasy stomach settle.

  ‘Come on,’ says Wing.

  He hauls her to her feet then continues a precarious journey along the ridge of the gorge, deeper into the mountains, instead of heading home.

  Lily’s heart bangs.

  One little word. That’s all it would take. All she needs to do is cry home and Wing will snap out of his wolf-trance. But the word sticks in her throat and she begins to follow. And the further they go, the harder it becomes to swallow her pride and head back.

  The sun falls behind the mountain as the short day ends, and the gorge deepens as it fills up with night.

  There is no moon-lamp tonight, or stars. One stumble and she will hurl down into the darkness. Lily grows ever more nervous, less and less sure that Wing would turn back now because he’s hot on the trail of his own small self when he came through these mountains before; re-tracking with animal instinct, tasting the wind, reading rock lichen patterns as if they are signposts, becoming ever more wolfish as he retraces the steps of his old journey.

  She bangs into Wing as he comes to a sudden halt. A great rubble of rocks blocks then way. With a rush of relief Lily sees that they must turn back now. Above is the sheer back of the mountain, below is the abyss. To clamber over the precarious rubble would surely risk it collapsing into the abyss, taking her and Wing down too.

  There is no way to get beyond the giant landslide. They’ve reached a dead end.

  ‘Tuck here,’ says Wing softly. ‘Or there,’ he adds, pointing down at the dark void.

  The stolen globe, then, is under the landslide or down in the abyss too. Either way, Lily sees, it is truly lost. Devastated, she kicks the rubble of rocks.

  It shifts. An ominous rumble comes from the landslide and she jumps back as rocks tumble down into the darkness. Lily counts to six before she hears them crash-land in the gorge. If the rock rubble is so unstable, then the landslide must be new.

  Was this the Earth thunder Wing heard from Candlewood Spire? The roar of rocks hurtling down into the gorge, here, as they did when they killed Tuck?

  Lily shivers.

  ‘Let’s go home.’

  At last she’s said it.

  There’s no answer. Lily whirls around. She scans the rocky rubble, checks the rough path behind her.

  Where’s Wing?

  The faintest echo of the rocks crashing into the abyss still hangs in the night. Panic seizes Lily and she closes her mind to the horror that Wing has hurtled down with them.

  But he is nowhere to be seen. Lily is alone in the dark in the place where the Earth smashed down on Tuck and the globe.

  THE DOOR INTO THE MOUNTAIN

  ‘Lil!’

  Never has Lily been so glad to hear her own name. Wing’s shout comes from the landslide. Is he under the rubble?

  ‘Where are you?’ she panics.

  ‘Here!’

  Lily edges towards his voice and sees a dark gap in the rubble – a narrow doorway between the landslide and the mountain.

  The vivid firestone eyes of Wing’s wolf head glisten in the darkness. The cool fire of Wing’s own eyes burn beneath.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ she cries.

  In answer, Wing grasps her hand and pulls her into the dark mountain doorway.

  ‘Taste the wind,’ he urges.

  Lily opens her mouth and draws in a breath, as Wing has taught her, then licks her lips.

  Salt! The wind carries a taste like the air of the salt caves of Mooncrumble Mountain on the far side of their lake, yet stronger and tangier with strange, lively scents.

  ‘Sea!’ says Wing.

  ‘I can’t see anything!’

  Then Lily understands. Blowing through the mountain is a sea wind. The wind of the world’s ocean.

  Wing disappears into the darkness of the mountain. Lily must turn for home now, alone, or follow him.

  She steps through the mountain doorway into darkness deeper than night. She stumbles over rubble, picks herself up and walks bang into a rock wall.

  ‘Wing?’

  The musky scent of wolfskin cuts through her panic. She feels Wing’s cool, rough hand grasping hers.

  ‘We can’t walk blind into a mountain,’ she tells him. ‘I didn’t pack a torch or a tinderbox . . . nothing.’

  And how stupid was that? But there is something: deep in the pocket of her parka and not much bigger than her hand. Lily’s fingers trace the soothingly familiar carvings of the little wooden box that once belonged to Granny Mary. It’s Mara’s precious heirloom
from her drowned island home.

  Storming from the burrow in a furious haze, glugging the flask of pme wine, Lily had given no thought to what she might need for a journey into the mountains – but she’d grabbed the box, with Granny Mary’s other heirloom inside; the halo that belongs to the lost globe. Her wild hopes of digging up the globe are dead now, but the halo has its own power. Lily opens the wooden box and takes out the sleek silver crescent. The heat of her hands will make it glow.

  And so it does.

  Lily holds up the brightening crescent and the wall of darkness retreats. She gasps as the light reveals what lies beyond the pile of rubble: a maze of tunnels, endless branchings into the mountain, where aeons of ice and meltwater once wormed their way through.

  Lily turns around in circles. They’d be crazy to walk into those dark tunnels. They might be lost forever.

  A fiery eye winks from a small crevice. Lily freezes with fright What unknown creatures lurk deep inside the mountains? The halo reveals another, past the rubble, deep in one of the tunnels. And there’s another, and yet more, all glinting at her from the rocks. Ah, but she knows what it is! It’s a firestone trail, just like the one that marks pathways through Candlewood’s trees.

  Lily feels a surge of emotion as she sees the evidence of a petrifying journey that until now, for her, has only been a story a cosy fireside tale. This was the way her people once came from the world beyond, marking their steps as they went. When they came through this mountain Mara was barely older than she, Lily, is now – fleeing into the unknown with a baby growing inside her.

  For the first time in her life Lily imagines her mother as a girl of her own age – one with no father or mother, no family or home; all of it lost to the ocean. She must have been terrified, and so brave.

  Lily’s nerve steadies – and her resolve. She will have this adventure. She will do something brave and grand, something that will gleam down the years and be told as a fireside tale one day. Something worthy of a girl descended from the likes of Caledon and Fox and Granny Mary and Mara.

  The globe Tuck stole might be well and truly lost, buried deep in the gorge, but it can’t be the only wizz in the world! If there are others, if she can find just one in the world at the other side of the mountain . . . well, she has a halo. She might still find a way to connect with her Fox father. So she must get through this mountain. It’s her only chance. She will never know her real father if she turns back now.