‘I know, sorry. I just don’t know what to do about it,’ said Ottilie, forcing her voice not to shake.
‘I do!’ said Skip, rubbing her fist.
‘All right, calm down. Who are you even talking about?’
‘Maeve Moth and Gracie Moravec.’
‘Who’s Gracie Moravec?’
‘The skinny blonde one Moth’s always with.’
Ottilie glanced across the room. The pair were sitting in the corner, one with raven hair and intense eyes, the other blonde, with very dark eyebrows.
‘Gracie’s never really –’
‘Call her Moravec. Suits her better,’ said Skip with narrowed eyes.
Gracie Moravec was a quiet girl with a perennially faraway look in her eyes. She seemed harmless enough.
‘I’d believe it was Maeve, but –’
‘That’s the point! No-one suspects ranky little Gracie Moravec. Moth’s hideous, to be sure – can’t stand the witch. But at least she’s sort of upfront about it. Moravec’s proper evil. Way more vicious, and dangerous, too, because she hides it all away. You think she’s a sweet, innocent little thing who needs to put a bit more bread in her belly, then, BAM!’
‘Then, BAM, what? She puts hair in your bed?’
‘I’m not joking.’
Ottilie glanced out the window. ‘I’ve got to go, I’m supposed to be at the shovel shed at dawn.’ She pulled on her boots and got to her feet. ‘Just don’t hit anyone while I’m out shovelling, all right?’
‘Fine.’ Skip scowled.
Ottilie headed for the door.
‘Bye, Shovels,’ said Maeve Moth in her strange, low voice.
Ottilie heard Gracie Moravec’s soft laugh as she pulled the door closed. ‘Shovels’ was quickly becoming her nickname, but she refused to acknowledge it. Shaking it off, she hurried down the winding staircase and out into the morning mist.
The grounds were shadowed in the last moments before dawn. No matter the season, the far west never lost that early morning chill. Ottilie hugged herself in the cold and hurried towards the shovel shed behind the pond. She could see the silhouettes of huntsmen jogging up ahead, and slowed her pace. With the exception of Gully and Scoot, Ottilie had taken to avoiding all contact with the boys that just a month ago had been her peers.
‘Ott!’
Ottilie jumped. She was increasingly jittery of late. Infamous for her deception, she knew she was being watched by all. Worse still, sometimes Ottilie felt she was being followed. Her hairs stood on end for no reason. Her back stiffened and her ears pricked, as if sensing sounds beyond her range of hearing. She put it down to the business with the sculkies making her paranoid.
A slender figure was trotting towards her out of the dark. Ottilie thought she recognised the voice.
‘Preddy?’
‘Hi,’ said Noel Preddy, hurrying up to meet her.
‘What are you doing here?’ She wrapped her arms tighter around her middle, freshly conscious of her shovelie suit.
‘I arrived last night. They, um, they asked if I wanted to transfer stations.’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘Because, well, they didn’t want to waste Leonard Darby as a guardian, now that he doesn’t have a fledge to train. And I suppose Wrangler Voilies recommended me, so …’
‘Oh. Right. That’s great, Preddy. I’m really glad you’re back.’ Ottilie tried to muster a smile, but wasn’t successful.
‘I felt really bad, Ott, taking your place, but I wanted to come back here with you lads … I mean …’
‘Preddy, it’s fine, really. It’s good. Of course you should have come back. We missed you! They shouldn’t waste Leo. He’s really good. And it’s Ottilie, really, if you want.’ She was being overly polite, and she didn’t quite know why.
‘I heard about all that. I can’t believe you didn’t tell us. And you were the whole time? I mean, you’re a …’
‘Yes, Preddy, I was a girl the whole time,’ she said, an uncomfortable smile creeping onto her face.
Preddy made a strangled coughing sound.
‘I couldn’t tell anyone.’
‘No,’ he coughed again. ‘And you’re a shovelie now?’
‘Yep.’
‘How is that?’
‘It’s fine.’
Preddy reached forwards and hesitantly patted her arm. Ottilie didn’t know what to say. She felt very small.
‘I have to go,’ she said, pointing over towards the pond. ‘I’m running late.’
‘Oh, me too!’ He glanced at the paling sky. ‘I’m supposed to meet Leonard Darby in the lower grounds at dawn.’
‘You better get going, he won’t like it if you’re late – and best call him Leo.’
‘Oh right, thanks. Well, it was really good to see you again.’
‘I’ll see you later. Good luck!’
Preddy smiled and hurried away. Ottilie stood still for a moment or two. She felt oddly jittery and lightheaded. Scrunching her eyes closed and clenching her fists, she willed herself to snap out of it. She would not feel sorry for herself. She would not feel small.
Ottilie thought she might actually be happier sleeping out in the shovelie bunks with the rest of her lot. Things were getting harder in the sculkie quarters. Skip was right. It was coming from Maeve Moth and Gracie Moravec. Maeve Moth had let her friendly facade slip entirely away. She was now downright rude to Ottilie whenever she saw her. Rudeness she could handle. It was the strange behaviour of Gracie Moravec that really had her on edge.
Ottilie woke one night, roused by movement in the bedchamber. Moonlight lit the room but her bed was cast in shadow. She looked up. Gracie Moravec was sitting upright in bed. She was utterly still, just staring across at Ottilie. It was too dark to make out her face but Ottilie had the horrible feeling she was smiling. When she went to speak Gracie settled back down beneath the covers as if nothing had happened.
Ottilie didn’t tell Skip about it. She didn’t know what to say. It seemed such a silly thing to be disturbed by. Even though she was quite sure Gracie was the instigator of all the horrible little pranks, Ottilie didn’t know how to respond. She could have told someone, some figure of authority – that was the right thing to do. But who could she tell? The custodian chieftess, irate that Ottilie was mingling with her sculkies, didn’t acknowledge Ottilie’s existence. The wranglers disapproved of her and she couldn’t bother Captain Lyre about something that seemed so silly compared to what the huntsmen were dealing with on a daily basis. In the end she let it go. If it happened again she would do something. That was what she decided.
As the weeks rolled by Maeve Moth became more unpleasant but, apart from a dead mouse Ottilie found in her boot, Gracie Moravec seemed to be leaving her alone.
‘She put a mouse in your shoe?’ said Gully, his legs dangling off the edge of a low-hanging branch.
In an attempt to avoid prying or disapproving eyes, they had gathered on the fringe of Floodwood, close to where the yicker had crawled out of Christopher Crow. Ottilie did her best to try to forget what had happened there, but it wasn’t easy with Scoot flinching at every rustle and snap.
‘Well, I don’t have any proof. I’ve never caught her at it, but Skip reckons it’s her,’ said Ottilie, pulling her dress up over her knees as she hopped onto a log. They’d given her dresses for daywear clothes. It was strange to be back in skirts. She had never noticed before how much they affected the way she moved.
‘Why are they being such rankers about it?’ said Scoot.
‘Who?’ said Ottilie. Something had caught her eye a little way through the scrub. She blinked and found her mind adrift in a displaced memory. A figure standing between two trees. It was months ago now, and so much had happened to distract her, but she remembered it; just before the yickers attacked, she’d seen a figure standing not far off, watching them.
‘The sculkies,’ said Scoot, squinting nervously at a flickering shadow.
‘Scoot, do you rememb–’ She s
topped herself. It was instinct, to hide her thoughts. She shut her mouth for the same reason she hadn’t mentioned her suspicions about the rule of innocence to the boys. This secret society was exclusive, elite and, above all, a brotherhood. They weren’t asking questions – not anymore. Ottilie, with her hidden identity, had always held a tenuous position within their little group, and now that the jig was up, whether they acknowledged it or not she was an outsider, and she was afraid of drifting further away.
Ottilie shrugged, considering Scoot’s question. ‘It’s because I, I don’t know … some of them are bitter because I dared to rise higher than my station. That’s how Voilies would put it.’
‘What station?’ said Gully, snapping a twig from the branch above.
‘I’m a girl and I pretended to be a boy.’
‘And?’
‘Well, the girls here are all custodians, and the boys get to be huntsmen. I guess it wasn’t fair on the rest of them that I got to do what they can’t.’ None of it’s fair, she thought.
‘But Skip’s not mad,’ said Scoot.
‘No, Skip always saw it differently. She thought it was great. I think she thought that because I’d done it, maybe one day she’d be able to hunt dredretches too. So much for that.’ Ottilie felt prickling behind her eyes. She looked up and willed away the tears.
Gully cracked the twig in two. He looked miserable.
The fort bell clanged, breaking the silence.
‘That’s me,’ said Ottilie. ‘I’ve got a shift in fifteen minutes.’
‘Me too,’ said Gully, leaping down from his branch. ‘I better get dressed.’
Ottilie patted the soil down and whistled for the bone singers to approach. Two blue-hatted bone singers came forward, their simple grey robes blending in with the tree trunks around them. Approaching the mound of freshly buried bones, they pulled fistfuls of crystalline granules from the sacks at their belts. Ottilie assumed the dust they sprinkled was salt of some kind, although it looked like there might be a bit more to it.
The bone singers with her that day were older than Ottilie, but not by a great deal. She was working with a boy and a girl, and she knew very little about them. Shovelies, it seemed, even a notorious one like Ottilie, were of very little interest to bone singers.
‘I’ll go and start on that other one,’ said Ottilie, pointing to a track through the wattle trees.
Their guards, two second-tier footmen, ignored her, but the female bone singer acknowledged her with a nod and Ottilie heard them begin their dulcet humming as she trekked off towards another pile of festering flesh and bone. She moved deeper into the forest, where the scrub grew thick and swamp gums towered. Ottilie stiffened. She felt strange. Beneath her rolled-up sleeves she could see the hairs on her forearms standing on end. She had the oddest feeling that she was being watched.
A pitchy twitter rang out somewhere above. Ottilie dove behind a rotting log. She knew that sound. It was a kikiscrax, a tiny blue birdlike dredretch that dripped poisonous black liquid from its feathers. Kikiscraxes were fast-moving and difficult to fell. Beakless, they seemed to have no mouth at all, but their bone-white claws stretched longer than the length of their bodies, and the tips were so sharp they could pierce a human skull. Ottilie felt for her ring. Despite its protection, she still felt a little queasy.
The kikiscrax passed over the log and disappeared into the trees. Ottilie wondered if she should call for the guards. She hesitated. It was strange. Why had it moved on? Why hadn’t it attacked? She was just about to get to her feet when she sensed movement ahead – no, not just ahead – all around. Dark shapes closed in, prowling through the trees. Lycoats. That was why the kikiscrax had gone. Most of the smaller monsters stayed out of way of the lycoats – a ruthless dredretch species that resembled armoured dogs.
The pack of lycoats stalked out of the surrounding brush. Five sets of pointed yellow teeth were bared in five identical snarls. Shell-like black armour wrapped around their middles, necks and legs. Yellowish fur grew in between the armoured areas, marking narrow places where an arrow could pierce their skin. Ottilie had never faced a lycoat before. They stuck to the thicketed areas that flyers couldn’t penetrate. Footmen usually took care of them.
Ottilie lifted her fingers to whistle for the guards. She knew it was pointless – they wouldn’t get there in time. The guards were really for the bone singers, not the shovelies. Shovelies were failures, a disgrace. They didn’t deserve protection. She would have to do the best she could with her shovel.
Less than a second before the whistle escaped her lips, an arrow shot through the trees, piercing the nearest lycoat between its armoured shoulders. The dredretch snarled and crumbled to the ground.
The pack sprung into action, one diving at Ottilie and the others turning towards the archer. Ottilie lunged to the side, gripped her shovel, and hit the attacking lycoat in the head. It fell sideways and smacked into a tree. She took the opportunity to glance at the huntsman.
It was Gully!
Gully and Ned had appeared through the trees. Ottilie froze for a moment. She had never seen Gully in action. It was horrible, like watching a child fight a wolf, but worse than that, much worse, because these weren’t wolves.
Ned was practically wrestling the largest lycoat, who wrapped its jaws around his arm, breaking the skin. Ned cried out, then gritted his teeth and managed to elbow it in the eye, forcing it to release its grip. The pair rolled over three times, locked together as if in an embrace, until Ned plunged a knife into its exposed furry chest and kicked it away. The lycoat rolled over twice more and came apart mid-turn.
Ottilie’s assailant was coming back for more. Holding her shovel at the ready, she braced to strike again.
‘Ottilie!’ Gully threw a dagger in her direction. It landed embedded in the ground behind her. Ottilie hit the lycoat again, lunged backwards to grab the dagger and, before it had a chance to recover, dived on top of it, plunging the blade into its chest. There were only two left now. Ned drew his cutlass and caught a lycoat mid-pounce, and Gully shot an arrow, taking the last.
The three of them stood for a moment, panting. Gully and Ned were so covered in dark dredretch blood it was impossible to make out their own injuries. She knew Ned’s arm had been punctured, but other than that it was probably just cuts and scrapes.
Ned turned to Gully. ‘They get you anywhere?’
Gully looked himself over, wrinkling his nose at the smell of dredretch blood. ‘No. That’s all theirs,’ he said, flicking a dark clot of it off his forearm.
‘How about you? You all right, Ott?’ said Ned.
‘Fine. They didn’t get anywhere near me,’ she said, holding up her shovel.
Ned looked like he might laugh, but instead said, ‘Nice work with that one,’ and pointed to the pile of clumped fur and rancid bones by her foot. ‘We should get moving, Gully.’
Ottilie had the sudden urge to grab hold of Gully and keep him from leaving. She didn’t want him out there, rolling around with dredretches.
‘See you later,’ said Gully.
Ottilie smiled, but didn’t speak. She felt so powerless, standing there in her shovelie suit. Things had seemed so much safer when instead of a shovel, she’d held a bow.
28
The Hex
Montie Kit placed a steaming bowl of black bean stew onto the old oak table. ‘Eat up,’ she said.
The kitchen smelled of dried garlic and freshly baked bread, and the air was warm and thick, like a meal in itself. Ottilie had been taking refuge in Montie’s kitchen whenever she needed an escape from the sculkie quarters. Through the steam, she regarded Montie’s half-twisted face. Up close, the scarring reminded Ottilie of the patterns on the trunk of an Uskler pine. The lumps twisted around her left eye socket were like a knot in the wood.
‘Eat,’ Montie repeated. ‘You look like you need it.’
Ottilie was no longer the underfed swamp creature she’d been when she first arrived at Fort Fiory. With the gen
erous meals provided by the Hunt, and the extra meals Montie presented her with whenever she visited, she had gained a fair amount of flesh on her once well-starved bones. Her body looked completely different to the one she remembered. Training had hardened her muscles and although she was no longer hunting, the shovelie work was still physically demanding.
‘Are you getting enough sleep?’ said Montie, her good eye scanning Ottilie’s face.
‘I think so.’ That was a lie.
Montie made a knowing noise deep in her throat. ‘I know you don’t think it, Ottilie, but you’re better off now,’ she said. ‘None of you should be out there hunting. It’s too dangerous.’
‘None of who?’ said Ottilie, narrowing her eyes.
‘Don’t you look at me like that, Ottilie Colter. I’m not saying it’s because you’re a girl. I’m saying it’s because you’re too young. All of them are. I don’t like it. I’ve never liked it.’
Ottilie had been wondering about Montie and Alba. She knew that most of the custodians had chosen to come here – many, like Skip, seeking a better life. She couldn’t find a way to phrase the question without seeming rude, so Ottilie had never asked, but she suspected that Montie’s presence in the Narroway might have something to do with the source of her scarring.
Ottilie had just scraped the last lump from her bowl when the kitchen door creaked open and Alba slipped into the room.
‘An hour and a half late, Alba,’ said Montie, who was drying plates with her back to the door.
‘Sorry Mum.’ Alba raised her brows, meeting Ottilie’s eye with a meaningful stare.
Ottilie blinked at her, tilting her hand ever so slightly, as if to say what?
Montie sighed and mounted a rickety ladder, stretching to reach the highest shelf. ‘You’re too late to help with clearing dishes, but you can place the gardener’s drop in the root cellar.’
‘I’ll help,’ said Ottilie, hopping off her chair. ‘Thanks for dinner. It was so good, I’ll just wash the bowl –’
Ottilie Colter and the Narroway Hunt Page 20