Ottilie Colter and the Withering World

by Rhiannon Williams

  Ottilie remembered the day Skip had finally become a huntsman. Conductor Edderfed had stood at the centre of the Moon Court, the wind howling overhead and the group of girls gathered at the front.

  She and Leo had been late. Flyers usually worked alone but, ever since Richter, Ottilie and Leo had begun hunting together whenever they could. They both preferred to be there to watch the other’s back.

  On that day, they had been held up by a troublesome vorrigle – a vicious winged dredretch, like an overgrown, hairy vulture with poisonous spines along its featherless wings. Vorrigles were tough to take down. They had finally shot it at the same time. Both claimed victory, but they would never know who it truly belonged to. Hunting had once been a deadly game – a fierce competition to be named champion – but no-one was keeping score anymore.

  Late, they slipped into the Moon Court. Leo made to head for the elites, not caring about disturbing the ceremony and no doubt eager to draw attention as he paraded to the front. But Ottilie held him back, forcing him to stand with Maeve.

  Maeve and Alba were two of the few members of their old sculkie squad who had not opted to join the Hunt. Both were taking part in the new mandatory training for every resident of the Narroway, but, as Alba had said from the beginning, she didn’t want to be a huntsman. Instead, she kept her old job helping her mother, Montie, in the kitchen.

  Maeve confided that she would have liked to join, but she wanted to focus on getting her magic under control. Of course, she didn’t tell anyone else her reasons. Maeve had been accused of witchcraft once, and nearly exiled to the Laklands as a result. In truth, Ottilie was glad Maeve was staying a sculkie – there was far less chance of injury, and they needed Maeve at her full strength now more than ever. Having a witch on their side gave Ottilie hope – especially for Scoot. A witch had turned him to stone. Surely another witch could cure him. They just had to figure out how.

  Conductor Edderfed cleared his throat. It was strange to see him standing there. Captain Lyre always addressed them at ceremonies, but he had been gone for weeks. He’d travelled east to All Kings’ Hill to ask the king to send reinforcements to the Narroway.

  The conductor looked grim. There was a deep crease between his brows, as if the coming words were sore for him to speak.

  ‘Some of you will know the legend …’ His voice was as full and deep as ever, but there was a stiffness to his delivery that Ottilie had not heard before.

  ‘It is a myth, nine hundred years old, of a great monster that terrorised the west. Haunting the wetlands, it earned the name fendevil.’

  Ottilie knew this story. Alba had told her about the legend of the first dredretch and the princess responsible for its demise. How interesting that Conductor Edderfed felt the need to wash it with the word myth. Alba had always said that the bones of the story, at least, were true.

  Someone nudged Ottilie’s elbow and whispered, ‘This was Captain Lyre’s idea.’

  She jumped and turned. Ramona Ritgrivvian had arrived. There were flecks of blood on her cheek, and a smear of mud trailed across her eyepatch.

  ‘I can’t believe I nearly missed this!’ Ramona muttered. ‘We just lost two horses.’ Her fiery hair was escaping from its braid and her uncovered eye was hooded and grave. ‘A clan of pikkaminers – they say they came out of nowhere.’

  Ottilie pictured the grey, spindly creatures with their needle fangs and bladed feet. They would have gone straight for the horses’ legs, sliced through tendons to get them to the ground and then swarmed …

  She twitched, dislodging the images.

  Ramona had said, out of nowhere. Ottilie only hoped that didn’t mean what she thought it meant – more dredretches freshly called to the surface. An increase in numbers was the last thing they needed. But it was not just the thought of more monsters that made her nerves jitter and jump, it was the suggestion that Whistler was active – making moves against them.

  The bone singers, once stationed as scorekeepers and mystical protectors of the forts, were really Whistler’s salvaged disciples. She lent them her power and they performed rituals over the bones, initiating resurrections under the pretence of preventing the very thing they were enacting. But as far as Ottilie knew, Whistler alone could summon dredretches from below.

  Was Whistler out there again, wandering the Narroway? Sneaking up on huntsmen? Ottilie had seen her lurking so many times in the past. The hooded figure …

  They believed she was once a pure fiorn, like Maeve. A witch with the ability to turn into a bird. But, twisted by rage and hatred, Whistler had begun summoning dredretches and controlling them. As a result, her winged form had turned monstrous, akin to the creatures that had become her army – a force she intended to use against the king of the Usklers, her nephew, Varrio Sol.

  Ottilie imagined Whistler watching from the shadows as the pikkaminers toppled the horses. She paled. ‘The riders?’

  ‘They survived,’ said Ramona. ‘But it’s a terrible thing, to lose your mount.’

  Ottilie felt a rush of phantom panic. She couldn’t even imagine losing her wingerslink, Nox.

  At the fore of the courtyard, Conductor Edderfed was still speaking in that strange, stilted manner. ‘The legends tell of a creature like a wingless firedrake. A scaled thing, five times the size of a horse, fangs the length of spears and breath of blue flame that could destroy all in its path.

  ‘But the monster needed none of these weapons, for anyone who came within striking distance dropped dead. They did not know it, but it was a dredretch – the first on record in the Uskler Islands.

  ‘Armies could not defeat it. Our people were dying … the story goes that the king’s youngest daughter, Seika Sol, lured the beast over a cliff, where it washed down a river and out into the sea. She became Seika Devil-Slayer.’ He paused, clearing his throat. ‘With her image you will be marked, and by her name you will be honoured.’

  There was none of Captain Lyre’s flair. No weight or wonder in the tale. Just fact, delivered as if he did not consider it factual.

  Ottilie couldn’t help but notice most of the wranglers were looking particularly stony. Wrangler Voilies had fixed a sickly smirk on his shiny face. Beside him, the scruffy, one-eyed Wrangler Furdles leaned over and muttered something in his ear. Voilies’ smirk seemed to suck inwards, as if he had just had a sip of hagberry juice. Wrangler Kinney, the gold-toothed wingerslink master, sat closest to Conductor Edderfed but looked pointedly away, out over the girls’ heads, his thumb tapping irritably on the whip tucked into his belt.

  ‘Edderfed was against all this “fuss”,’ said Ramona, leaning close. ‘But Captain Lyre argued that the girls would feel so set apart, and so behind in training – he wanted them to have something special to hold onto.’

  ‘Why would Conductor Edderfed care about giving them a special name?’ whispered Ottilie. It was utterly baffling that, after everything, they were still having arguments about the girls’ place in the Narroway.

  ‘The legend of Seika Devil-Slayer is a funny one,’ said Ramona. ‘In the past, it got mixed up with some dark rumours and the royals eventually buried the story. But a princess defeating a monster, that’s a tough one to keep down. Whispers managed to bleed through generations.’

  ‘What dark rumours?’ said Ottilie.

  ‘Something to do with witches. Witchcraft always rears its ugly head whenever a girl does something unexpected or extraordinary.’

  Fear was such a strange reaction. Ottilie didn’t think she would ever understand that sort of thinking. She looked to the front. This was the end of the sculkie squad. They had become the Order of Seika – soon to be known as the Devil-Slayers. Behind Conductor Edderfed, Wrangler Morse lifted a curtain, revealing a bronze shield mounted on the wall with an engraving of a duck on its centre.

  Why were there ducks everywhere? There was a painting in Captain Lyre’s chambers and a carving on the well in the canyon caves. Back in the Usklers a duck marked the hatch that led to the Wikric Tunne
ls. Now there was this shield, and another was stitched onto the uniforms of Fiory’s newest recruits.

  Ottilie noticed Conductor Edderfed didn’t even look at the duck – but Ramona was smiling. This must have been Captain Lyre’s doing, too.

  ‘That’s Seika Sol’s mark,’ said Ramona. ‘After she defeated the fendevil they made it the royal insignia – it was for centuries, but Viago the Vanquisher changed it to a battleaxe as soon as he became king.’

  ‘Whistler’s father?’ said Ottilie. Viago the Vanquisher was the king responsible for the dredretch infestation in the Laklands. A century ago, when the Lakland army helped save the Usklers from the clutches of the Roving Empire, it was promised that all old feuds would be forgotten. A vow was made that the Usklers would never invade the Laklands again.

  The damnable act of the Usklerians breaking that vow, and the resulting monstrosities of war, poisoned the land – sinking down into the soil, calling dredretches to the surface and sealing the fate of the Laklands, that desolate kingdom to the west.

  Its people had paid the ultimate price for the evil enacted upon them. The Laklanders who survived escaped into the Usklers. Some settled peaceably. Others sought vengeance. To this day, Laklanders were branded enemies by Usklerians – because, Ottilie suspected, the Usklerians feared the Laklanders could not forgive them. How could the Usklerians trust anyone they had wronged so deeply in the past?

  ‘You’re missing it,’ Leo hissed.

  Ottilie thought she caught a wet gleam in the corner of his eye. With a grin, she snapped her head to the front just in time to see Conductor Edderfed present Skip with her uniform at long last. After seven years in service to the Narroway Hunt, Skip was finally a huntsman.

  Now here she was on this misty summer morning, wearing that uniform, a look of deep concern darkening her face. ‘I just talked to Alba,’ she said. ‘She told me about the burns on Ned’s arm.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘We’re going to have to watch him.’

  Ottilie tensed. She’d told Alba at breakfast that she was worried about Ned, and she found it slightly irritating that Alba had already passed it on to Skip. It didn’t need to be a secret, but Skip’s attitude made her defensive. ‘What are you getting at?’

  Skip glanced around and lowered her voice. ‘Well … it’s Gracie Moravec all over again, isn’t it?’

  A fierce protectiveness swelled. ‘No, it is not!’ She remembered Gracie’s wyler bite. The way it glowed like hot coals. She imagined her own skin bulging and blistering, breaking apart. She clenched her fist. ‘They’re just burns. They’re not from a dredretch – it’s not a bloodbeast thing.’

  Bloodbeasts were a fresh horror in the Narroway, and had become Ottilie’s own personal nightmare. Whistler rewarded her favourite followers by binding them to a dredretch. By Ottilie’s count, there were at least three out there. Gracie had been bound to a wyler – its bite was just the beginning. The wyler’s burnt-orange fur had turned white, and the beast had begun to grow. The last time Ottilie had seen it, it was the size of a pony. It was now Gracie’s bloodbeast, and Gracie could not only take control of its mind and see through its eyes, she could do the same with every wyler. Under her command, the wylers had become a deadly pack, responsible for the death of Scoot’s guardian, Bayo Amadory, and the serious injury of many others.

  ‘We don’t know what they did to Ned in those caves,’ said Skip. ‘If he’s not healing properly … and Alba said you were worried about how he looked this morning. Remember how sick Gracie got?’

  ‘Stop it, Skip!’

  She arched a brow. ‘Why did you see him so early anyway?’

  ‘He was just saying happy birthday.’ Ottilie wasn’t sure why, but it felt like a lie.

  Skip’s face softened. ‘It’s your birthday!’ She cracked a crooked smile and caught Ottilie in a hug. ‘Go mess some monsters to celebrate.’

  Ottilie snorted. ‘You sound like Leo.’

  ‘It’s a pity they’re not doing points since the bone singers all turned out to be evil. Beating him would have been fun.’

  ‘You’re in different tiers – you wouldn’t have been against each other,’ said Ottilie. ‘And fledglings spend half the time training anyway. You don’t get nearly as much hunting time.’

  ‘Listen to you schooling me about the Hunt.’ Skip grinned. ‘Just like old times, only backwards.’ She laughed. ‘I better go – got to check on Preddy in the infirmary.’

  ‘In the what – why?’ Ottilie spluttered. This was what it was like now; a brief moment of laughter, of feeling like things were normal again, and then reality would smother the sun. ‘What happened?’ Had Preddy been hurt on their hunt?

  With the exception of the fourth tiers, who got a year off from acting as guardians, the elites were already paired up with the new fledglings. So the directorate had decided to pair the Devil-Slayers with second-tier huntsmen in the order most suited to them.

  After an assessment of her skills, Skip, who had been having secret horse-riding lessons with Ramona since her first year at Fiory, was placed with the mounts, and assigned Preddy as her guardian. Although pleased to be working with Preddy, Skip insisted it was a sneaky insult to allow the fourth-tier elites their year off, and pair the girls with the far less experienced second tiers instead. Ottilie was inclined to agree.

  Gully had been partnered with Fawn Mogue, one of the first members of the sculkie squad. It turned out she was impressively gifted with a cutlass. Ottilie, for whatever reason, hadn’t been given a fledge. She suspected it was because they thought her less capable of teaching. She didn’t care too much – she was still getting used to flying Nox on her own. Preddy had been riding horses since he could walk. He was far more qualified to be a mentor. Still, even he couldn’t avoid injury …

  ‘Preddy’s fine – a scratch,’ said Skip. ‘He just needed it cleaned.’

  Ottilie let out a breath. ‘I’m late.’

  Leo hated being late, and she didn’t want him to go out there alone.

  4

  The Philowood Tree

  The two wingerslinks swept low across a basin of krippygrass, cutting through a swarm of stingers. There was a throaty grunt from behind and Leo flipped to sit backwards in Maestro’s saddle, shooting an arrow into the gaping mouth of a sword-tusked olligog.

  The lumbering terror staggered and rolled with a muddy splatter. The bluish scales on its stomach seemed to reflect the midday sky before sinking beneath the grass.

  For Ottilie, hunting was about more than monsters now. She was always distracted; one eye on the dredretches and the other seeking signs, any clue that might lead her to Bill. But there was nothing. Every day – nothing.

  Their hunt took them north, towards the Withering Wood. Ottilie would never forget the first time she had visited that festering patch of forest. Of everything she had seen, nothing disturbed her more than the withering sickness. And it was spreading. As they flew over woodlands that had only weeks ago been breathing and bright, Ottilie’s chest tightened. Blackness licked the tree trunks, curling like claws around branches, suffocating the trees until their leaves drooped and dripped like stalactites.

  ‘Something’s moving down there,’ said Leo.

  Ottilie felt a strange humming in her pocket. It was the necklace, with its little shard of dredretch bone, that Bonnie had given her weeks and weeks ago.

  Ottilie had visited the bone singer in the burrows, begging for answers – for a way to cure Scoot. Bonnie hadn’t been able to help, but she had given Ottilie the necklace – the one that Whistler gave each of her bone singers, sharing a little of her magic and protecting them from attack.

  Ottilie had carried it with her ever since. She wasn’t sure why – perhaps to remind her Whistler was out there. But it had never done this before. This strange vibration. It was unnerving.

  Nox tensed. Ottilie reached for her bow and nudged her to circle lower, but the wingerslink lurched backwards, refusing to descend.

  Below them, Leo gr
owled, ‘Get her under control, Ott! She shouldn’t still be pulling this stuff!’

  Ottilie nudged her more firmly, but Nox just circled higher. ‘She doesn’t want to go!’ She couldn’t blame the beast. The rotting stench was unbearable. They could hardly breathe down there.

  Leo threw up his hands. Then, after signalling for her to wait, he took Maestro down. Ottilie didn’t like it. He shouldn’t be going alone. Nox liked it even less. She snarled, beating her wings and rocking from side to side.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Nox was throwing Ottilie about so much, she couldn’t focus through the trees. There came a flash from below and Ottilie’s heart faltered.

  ‘Down,’ she growled, thinking only of Whistler, of that impossible black light that broke when she changed into her winged form.

  She had known it was coming. Everyone knew Whistler would not stay hidden for long.

  Nox understood her. Leo was down there and they had to go to him. She swept in spirals, giving Ottilie a chance to see what was happening below. The air temperature rose with their descent. The stench snaking into her lungs felt like a violation. She coughed and pulled herself together.

  Leo and Maestro had landed in a deadened clearing near the darkest patch of the Withering Wood. They were fine, and there was no threat in sight. Leo, still mounted, had nocked an arrow and was staring intently at the vast, still vertical, corpse of a tree.

  It resembled the husk of a spider. What was left of its branches drooped to the ground in jagged arms, creating a cage around a hollow trunk.

  Something was happening in the heart of that ancient shell. There was a crack, like bones breaking, and another flash of lit black. The air roared and whistled like wind through slits in stone.

  Nox landed beside Maestro and Ottilie felt a familiar wave of nausea as a sheet of hot air smacked her in the face. They were trained to ward off the dredretch sickness, a sickness that was fatal to anyone exposed for too long. But Ottilie had always struggled – even with the help of the warding ring she had been given as a fledgling. Like everyone else’s, it was engraved with a line from the lightning song, an old rhyme Gully used to chant. Sleeper comes for none. The sleeper was the collector of the dead. The words were a promise of protection, but they had changed after the battle at Richter. Another line took their place: pay for what you’ve done. Only Ottilie’s ring hadn’t changed because, for whatever reason, Whistler was not finished with her yet.