The Wind of Southmore

by Ariel Dodson

  “Well, girls,” she started again, trying to sound bright and lively. “I should introduce myself.”

  “I know who you are,” Arlen said. “I’ve seen your picture.”

  “Yes,” Alice agreed, feeling slightly like a bystander. “So have I.”

  “Oh,” said Margaret. “Then at least you weren’t shocked,” and she tried to laugh. It didn’t go down well.

  “Now, girls,” she tried again after a few moments, feeling almost as if she were back in the office when the pitch wasn’t going as she’d anticipated. “I – understand that you may not feel too happy about me. I know – what I did was – wrong. I shouldn’t have done it. I know that.” How much they looked like her mother, she thought. And how she recognised the steely look in Arlen’s eyes, the resentment, the independence, so like Maud’s. She could remember now, standing on the stone steps, leaving the little bundle with her aunt, desperate to make her way and escape the bleakness, and feeling terrified and guilty and wondering where her ex had taken Alice. “I know,” she said softly. “I shouldn’t have done it. But I was only a teenager. I couldn’t cope. I had to find out – for myself. I – I’m successful now. I work for a public relations firm in the West End, and I have a lovely flat – big enough for all three of us – and I – I would love you to come and live with me. I’ll try to make it right.”

  “And after all,” came the soft voice of Mrs Trevallen, who had crept silently back in and was laying out cups and saucers. “What choice do you have?”

  It was true, and they all knew it.

  “Don’t worry, dear,” Mrs Trevallen whispered to Margaret as she sent the twins to the car, clutching small carrier bags with really nothing in them. “They’ll come around. You all just – need a chance to know each other.”

  “Yes – yes – I guess – you’re right,” Margaret said slowly, as she gazed on the small identical faces through the glass of the car window. “Thank you so much. I don’t know if we’ll be back.”

  No, no, I don’t wonder,” agreed Mrs Trevallen, as she waved them off. “They’ve been through enough here, poor dears.”

  The atmosphere was very still as the car wound its way through the tiny roads, back towards the motorway. None of them could avoid glancing back at the jagged cliff edge, where the castle had once stood. The girls could still see the remnants of their tower room in the ocean, like the last sentinel of a castle beneath the sea, and Arlen could almost see the images of the alchemist and Isobel and Imogen, along with a very young Mac. Behind him, was a young woman, her hair loose in the breeze and flying around her bony face, and the hint of a smile playing on her lips. They were staring at the car, from the pale sunlight amongst the ruins. She could not suppress a small sob, and her eyes became wet and stinging. For just a moment in the glint of the sun she thought she could see the outline of another young woman beyond them, her head bowed beneath a heavy hood, her arm outstretched and reaching. Arlen turned her head sharply, but the image was gone, and she shrugged as she met Alice’s questioning gaze. “I’m not used to the sunlight,” she said, softly, her stomach knotting into a tight ball. She was still there, and if she wasn’t Imogen or Isobel, then who was she? The name slipped into her head suddenly – Morwenna – and she turned cold as she realised that part of the puzzle remained unanswered. Mac had not mentioned the name, and even if there had been a reason for it, he was no longer there to ask. There was no reason that Robbie would know, even if he did follow up on his promise to keep in touch. She bit her lip suddenly, and tightly gripped the small bag in her pocket that contained the fragments of the Penmorven ruby.

  Alice, noticing, asked no more questions, but slid back silently in her seat, and watched the scenery flash past in a melting drizzle of sunwashed colour.

  They had found the path to fulfil their task, and they had succeeded. But there were no charms or legends to help them with the road that beckoned before them now, and, although they knew that they were together, both girls felt slightly uncomfortable.

  Margaret, glancing at them from time to time through the rearview mirror, sighed to herself, and wondered if she was doing the right thing. But she couldn’t just leave them there. Strange little creatures, they were, such intense little faces, neither really resembled she or Gary at all. She sighed again. It was going to be a long ride back to London.

  ###

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ariel Dodson is a writer of fantasy books for adults and teenagers. She currently lives in London and is working on the third instalment of the Southmore trilogy. Watch out for the second book in the series, The Witch’s Sister, which is shortly to be published on Smashwords.

  COMING SOON

  THE WITCH’S SISTER

  Two years after the terrifying events at Southmore Arlen and Alice share a strained existence with their mother. A holiday to Edinburgh seems just the thing to bring the family closer together. But the voices of the past echo still, and when the tragic story of two sisters, victims of the Scottish witch hunts, reaches into the present, Arlen must call on an ancient power if she is to save her sister’s life. But power comes at a price and Arlen will not be quite the same again, especially when Robbie MacKenzie, her ally from Southmore, reappears on the scene…

  Read on for an extract from The Witch’s Sister, coming soon to Smashwords!

  Chapter One

  The car wound slowly around green pine hills, mini-forests of close, secretive darkness, a tiny memory of the once bountiful woodland which must have covered the area. They were well over the border now, and their mother’s usually fast, impatient driving, designer shoe constantly down on the accelerator, had given way to a resigned lethargy. The motorway had been busy – holiday time – and wet, and Arlen, seated alone in the backseat, had gazed blankly on a monotonous greyness through the blurring rivulets of water that ran down the pane in small streams. They had left her alone. Alice, in the front with their mother, had spent much of the journey occupied in switching CDs around with short breaks for Radio 4 news, as requested by Margaret. Having stopped briefly for an undercooked, greasy fast food meal at a rest station, they had been back on their way for several hours, and once over the border the blank grey wall outside the window had given way to a dark greenery. Even through the tear-stained windows Arlen could see the tall fronds swaying slightly in the breeze, whispering close, dark, forgotten secrets of the earth. Had they even noticed her? she wondered idly. Were humans of any consequence at all to them, until they felt the cold teeth of the chainsaw biting into their trunks?

  Occasionally they passed a small stone farm, or a tiny gaggle of houses close together, but mostly it was tall hills with frowning trees. Arlen leant her forehead against the window and felt the condensation gather on her skin with slimy fingers. She had caught a small glimpse of the sea when they crossed over, a quick glimmer of sun and blue water revealed by a temporary break in the clouds, but it was alien and she drew her jacket more closely around her.

  “Are you alright back there?” her mother’s voice broke through for a second, as it had done for intervals throughout the trip, and, not really expecting an answer, then resumed its conversation with Alice about the house and holiday plans. Oh Margaret had tried, there was no doubt about that, but after two years she had grown used to her eldest daughter’s long silences and her strange, deep eyes that turned to look through and beyond her when she addressed them. The twins had clung together the first few months. Margaret had never entirely unravelled the story of the girls’ meeting in Southmore and, to be perfectly honest, didn’t really want to know. The thought of her childhood home in the tiny Cornish village gripped her like ice at the heart – so far away from everything that mattered, so behind the times, so strange. In a way, she could attempt to understand Arlen’s reticence – poor child, all alone there for twelve years except for ancient Aunt Maud, who had always had a plank or two missing if Margaret remembered correctly. But such sympathetic thoughts usually allowed other memories to surface,
namely the splitting of the twins as babies between their parents, and the teenage Margaret, driving down one gale-blown, soaking day, to deliver baby Arlen into that life. No wonder the girl didn’t feel that she could trust her, and that was what Margaret did feel when Arlen turned her strange, bright gaze on her mother. She wasn’t trusted. And although she couldn’t blame her daughter, she preferred to switch off from those feelings of guilt and think about something more positive, which wasn’t hard, as the PR firm she worked for had recently landed a large museum contract and the work had been pouring in. That was one of the reasons she had finally decided to opt for the holiday in Edinburgh and Barney’s recommendation of the traditional Scottish house available for rent over the summer. Barney Thompson had been the firm lawyer almost as long as Margaret had worked there, and they had had an on-again, off-again relationship for years. Currently they were back on, and Margaret had been torn between taking the girls on holiday to Hawaii with him or spending some quality time, as the saying went, alone with her daughters.

  Not that she hadn’t tried already. She had taken several weeks off when she had first collected them from Cornwall – tiny, thin creatures with enormous eyes and haunted expressions. Neither would talk about what had happened there except in vague terms, and a child psychologist friend of a colleague had suggested that it was probably best to let them get around to it themselves. Love and trust come first, tackle the other problems later. And she had tried. Talking with them, taking them out, telling them about work. She had pulled strings and got them into a good school, had attended every parent-teacher night, and helped them with their homework. Arlen more than Alice, poor thing. Her education had been seriously neglected, and although she could outshine any of the others in the reading department, was decidedly deficient in other areas and needed an awful lot of extra work. She had thought about a learning assistant, except that it made it look as if Arlen was troubled or mentally challenged in some way, and she hadn’t felt it was fair. So she had engaged a private tutor and given up time herself. There had been some progress, but the annoying thing was that she always had the feeling that Arlen was quite capable of quick study, it was just that she didn’t see the point and couldn’t be bothered. She had tried to explain to her about the modern world but this was hard, especially when the child had grown up amongst a village of elderly people still living as if it were centuries earlier.

  It was strange, too, that the closer she and Alice seemed to grow, the more strained the twins’ relationship appeared. The household had altered from the girls huddled and whispering secretively together in a corner, to Margaret and Alice becoming the best of friends and Arlen always seeming to be the spare part. This was through no fault of theirs, Margaret was sure. They had both tried to include her, but she didn’t seem to be interested. In some way, it seemed as if she was still living in Southmore in her mind, and she became more and more introverted as the months went on. She constantly carried a small velvet pouch in her pocket, and occasionally would take it out and peer into it like a sybil, so that Margaret couldn’t help but wonder what it was Aunt Maud had actually been teaching her. Once she had come upon her by surprise, with the contents of the pouch spilled over her hand like fiery drops of blood, but when she had sensed someone behind her she had drawn the fragments quickly together in her closed fist and disappeared into her room. Margaret had had a vague, frightening sense of having seen them somewhere before, and had suffered strange dreams for the next few nights about a dark, tossing sea and a white hand, some recurrent nightmare from her childhood that she had submerged well into herself and forgotten all about. She had watched Arlen more closely from that time, a fear growing silently in her heart for her strange, lost daughter.

  Alice had been suspicious at first and very protective of her sister, recognising how new everything was to her. Alice had been badly raised as well by Gary, their good-for-nothing father, a small time gambler and crook, although Margaret hadn’t known that when she married him. The relationship hadn’t lasted long, any feelings well over before the twins were born, but Gary had insisted that he have one of them, as if they were things rather than people, simply because he didn’t like to feel he was missing out, and Margaret, at nineteen and in the throes of a severe depression, hadn’t felt able to cope with one baby let alone two. So Arlen had ended up in Cornwall with Aunt Maud, and Alice had spent the first twelve years of her life on the run with her father, dodging the law and occasionally bullets, and often living out of peanut and biscuit packets at hotels, where her father would leave her alone for long periods of time, out on his “business trips”. Margaret felt as though she would kill him if she ever saw him again, but then, she had let him take Alice, knowing full well he wouldn’t – couldn’t – be a responsible parent. She had been so determined to make it up to them, and Alice, after her initial hostility which Margaret couldn’t help but feel was partially echoed from Arlen, had become good friends with her mother and had settled well into London life. A stable home, stable school, and the modern, predictable world she was used to, had left Alice chatty and excited and happy. She had tried to encourage Arlen to enjoy her new life, but Arlen had appeared to regard this as some sort of traitorous behaviour. Margaret had hinted to Alice for the story, but Alice had remained tightlipped, and at one point had departed to her room in tears. Therapy might be on the cards eventually, but Arlen had been through enough for the moment, and Margaret was determined to give her as much space as she needed.

  That was one of the reasons she had chosen this holiday and the freedom of a large rented house, just outside of Edinburgh, and complete with housekeeper and gardener, where she could switch off the phone and the laptop and be with her girls for a full month before the onslaught of the new account in September. She needed to know them properly, and after two years of trying still didn’t feel as if she had scratched much of the surface. It was funny – they looked identical, except for the fact that Alice was growing her hair out like the other girls at school, while Arlen maintained the chin length blunt bob with its sharp fringe that she had always had – and yet they seemed so different. Alice was very much like her, she felt, and could adapt quickly. But Arlen –

  And it wasn’t as if she was like her father – no, there was nothing subtle or mysterious or deep about Gary. His cockney bluntness, which had been different and thrilling, and even a little bit dangerous to her when she was a teenager, now filled her with a cold, sick shudder. His quick temper, his selfishness, his long nights out without telling anyone – and she had let him take one of their girls. She brushed Alice’s hair back from her face with a quick, fierce gesture. Alice turned and smiled, still singing along with her CD. But Arlen – although at times her face took on an expression which oddly reminded her of Aunt Maud – she didn’t know at all.

  “How much longer?” Alice asked then, breaking sharply into her reverie. She had removed the current CD from the player and was contemplating the next one.

  “Oh, ah,” Margaret tried to collect her thoughts, “about ten minutes into the city, I think. It’s been a little while since I’ve been up here. Why don’t you leave the CDs for a while and we’ll see if we can get any inkling of the weather for the next few days.”

  “OK,” Alice slid back in her seat with a magazine and Margaret, thankfully it must be admitted, switched the radio back on.

  “That’s good,” she remarked after a few minutes. “We may be in luck. Clear skies until Sunday at least.”

  But she was talking to herself, for Alice was engrossed with reading and Arlen, as always, was lost in her own world. Margaret sighed, and pretended it was just her and the radio.

  Alice perked up as the scenery began to scatter and the blackened buildings of Old Town sprang up around them in a concrete smoke. She had been to Edinburgh once before with her father, but had not been allowed out to see anything, although she knew the interior of the hotel very well. She leaned forward with excitement as the car made its way up Lothian Road
and turned right into Princes Street, past the Castle.

  But the short gasp came suddenly from Arlen in the back, and Margaret smiled to herself, pleased that a reaction had been gained. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” she said.

  Arlen felt cold suddenly, the Castle grim and foreboding on the black rock, winking in the pale sunlight, tourists crawling like brightly coloured ants to the top. It seemed familiar somehow, dangerously familiar, and she had felt a sudden flash as if of fire all around her, while from within the flames a pair of cat-green eyes suddenly blinked before her in the car window, as though borrowing her own face, just for an instant, and then she was staring into her own grey eyes once more. In the sudden horror of the second she could almost feel those other grey eyes piercing, waiting. It couldn’t be, she thought quickly, trying to quench the sudden panic. It’s just imagination, like all the dreams. We’ve seen the last of him. Alice saw him shatter. It can’t be him.

  But if it wasn’t him, she wondered then, pulling her thin jacket more closely around her, then who was it?

  ALSO BY ARIEL DODSON

  BLOOD MOON

  Auvergne, 1588. A young nobleman severs a wolf's paw as a trophy for his wife. But the contents of the bloody package prove to be something far more terrifying ...

  A chance meeting with young lord, Etienne Sanroche, catapults 15 year old Laure Beaumains from her isolated forest home into the glittering artifice of the castle. But the lure of the natural world proves too strong, and when Laure is attacked by a creature of the forest, the tragic events that follow test Laure and Etienne's love and lives to an unimaginable limit. For a wolf cannot be tamed, and thwarted freedom bites in blood...

  Purchase Blood Moon at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/315456