The Huntress: Sky

by Sarah Driver

‘Who?’ asks Crow, jaw flickering as he grinds his teeth.

  Riders fidget, a crackle of fear passing between them. Lamplight glances off the rings in their noses, making them look like a tangle of stars. Their whispers crowd the air, until the wind fizzes with one word.

  ‘Wilderwitches! ’

  Then the howl comes again. Closer. It cracks the sky like a throatful of death and rings eerily off the distant icebergs. I hunch low, digging my nails into my palms, breath tattered.  This must be witch-work.

  ‘They’re pack hunting again!’ shouts Pangolin.

  ‘Shushhh!’ orders Lunda.

  Pack hunting ? I turn to Crow. ‘Have you heard of Wilderwitches? Are they sky-hunters?’

  But Crow’s answer is knocked from his mouth when a rider thwacks him in the back with the butt of their spear. He opens his cloak, presses his face inside and lets out a muffled stream of growls and curses. Then he sits with his hood pulled up, glowering face shielded by folds of cloth.

  Lunda steps along her draggle’s back as easy as I would in the rigging. ‘Which direction are they coming from?’ she hisses.

  Pangolin glances around. I watch her face; all the tiny workings of her muscles, the tenseness.

  Then I spit. ‘Help me, right now, or I’ll summon that thing closer!’ I say it with all the bluster I’ve got, cos I ent the foggiest whether I can summon it or whether I’d want to, but if this Tribe think I can, maybe they’ll help my brother.

  ‘You will not summon anything!’ Lunda thunders. ‘You are the Protector’s prisoner !’

  ‘Ha! You try and stop me.’ I check Sparrow again – his breath comes weak and flutter-quick, but it’s there.

  Then I stand. My howl’s brewed hot and stormy so when I send it up it’s the fiercest I’ve ever howled, and proper loud.

  The horde of riders flinch in their saddles, and Lunda guides her draggle towards the net, raising her knuckle-ringed fist.

  Crow moves to shield me but he stumbles, nearly stepping on my brother, so I shove him out of the way and he curses at me, eyes like fire-arrows.

  Before I can gift him a sorry, the strange witch-howl comes a third time, closer still. It rattles through my marrow and cloaks the threats Lunda hurls at me. A deep hush follows it, like falling snow. Lunda freezes, her fist still raised.

  In the silence I duck low again and put my face close to Sparrow’s mouth, feeling a tiny hot flutter of breath touch my cheek.

  ‘Lunda, we need to hide,’ says Pangolin, two spots of heat blooming in her round cheeks. ‘We cannot outpace them.’

  ‘No.’ Lunda smiles, white hair wispy-wild. ‘We will smash them for daring to threaten us – we were made for this fight.’

  Riders whisper and write symbols on their chests with their fingertips again. Pangolin’s breath gushes out like she’s winded. ‘But there aren’t enough of us. We’ll be dragged to our deaths!’

  DeathdeathdeathdeathDEATH! screeches one of the draggles, and fright bolts through the flock. They jostle, the riders grapple with the reins and Lunda’s thrown face down on her draggle’s back. She scrabbles to grip the staff holding our net, almost dropping it. Before I can stop myself, I’m staring down at the snow, stained black with terrodyl blood.

  Lunda jerks to her knees, spitting out a mouthful of orange fur. ‘You idiot !’ she gasps at Pangolin, purple-faced. ‘You’ve spooked them!’ She uncoils a black whip from her waist and starts furiously lashing her beast to try and control it. The others do the same, but still the creatures buck and writhe in the sky. The net judders and Crow groans, clutching his belly.

  Finally Lunda gets her draggle turned around. ‘Pangolin has forced us into a cowards’ escape, despite the fact that this is our rightful sky-territory!’ she calls. ‘We must get the sea-creepers to Hackles before the Wilderwitches swoop. Douse the lamps and follow the stars!’

  Pangolin’s draggle wobbles for a beat, and she fights with the reins until it steadies. Then she pulls her raindrop cowl over her tear-stained face and vanishes from sight.

  The riders smother their lights. A velvet darkness snuffles close.

  Are the Wilderwitches a Sky-Tribe, too? What kind of Tribe hunts and howls like wolves? My mind soars, fast as a hawk. Until now I’d reckoned there were no Sky-Tribes at all.

  The riders flit after their leader. The wind bites my hands and face as we’re pulled through the air, the opening in the top of the net sealing again as the tendril unravels from the staff.

  A damp mist begins to rise. It presses against the net. ‘They’re coming closer!’ yells a voice.

  My ears fill with the sharp cracking of whips. I squint through the raindrop net and watch the mist thicken. It bristles like fur, then separates into ghostly shapes that streak through the air, uttering yips and howls. I croak Crow’s name but my voice is drowned by the yells of the riders.

  ‘Hurry!’ one cries. ‘The sky-wolves are almost upon us!’

  We’re flying fast, too fast for me to try to help my brother, and the mist is a stew-thick fog that the riders try to brush from their eyes. ‘Faster!’ shouts Lunda. ‘Don’t swallow even a wisp of this witch-fog!’

  When the howl comes again it’s splintered into a hundred fragments that throb all around us and set my teeth rattling. I clamp my eyes shut.

  When I look again, the fog has furred and toothed and clawed itself into an army of wolves, some with white or grey fur, others black or red. I wrap my arms around myself and think of bolting along the Huntress ’s deck, her salt- and snow-dusted boards crunching under my boots, sunlight dancing in Da’s hair. I will us home with every stitch of blood and bone, but naught happens.

  ‘There’s summat fearful wrong about these wolves,’ mutters Crow.

  I raise my ice-stiffened brows. ‘They’re prowling through the flaming sky, for one thing.’

  ‘It’s more than that,’ he snaps. ‘Their faces are more human than animal.’ He stares at the wolves as they race closer and closer. ‘Can you hear their – what do you call it?’ He flails for the words.

  I squint at him impatiently. ‘Beast-chatter?’

  ‘Aye. That’s the one.’

  I listen again, hard, but there’s a silence. I shake my head.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ he whispers. ‘They’re shape-changers, not wolves.’

  I stare at Crow as his words wash a memory over me – when he was Stag’s spy, hiding aboard our ship in bird form. If I listened for his beast-chatter there was just emptiness, cos he weren’t really a beast at all.

  We lock eyes in the gloom and I quickly look away, watching the sky-wolves for as many beats as I dare while Crow’s gaze burns my skin.

  The fog’s closed over us like a shroud, poking up our noses and worming into our lungs. Far below, slices of land and sea chink through it, then vanish again. Our path curves to the right, towards a wall of blackness. Storm clouds? My gut twists, but soon we’re close enough to see that it’s not cloud at all.

  We’re headed for a bulk of pure, solid mountain.

  A mountain range that makes me know that others I’ve seen were just hills. This mountain is a place so huge, of so much old power, that I’ve never felt so small in all my life.

  The wolves howl, one by one, ’til their voices join into a long, throaty wail. They lope through the sky, snouts carved open into eager snarls. Their eyes are a mix of blues and greens and greys. Human, like Crow said.

  Suddenly one lunges from the mist to the right and snatches a draggle and its rider clean out of the sky. The rider plummets towards the valley below with a strangled scream, and the sky-wolf shakes the draggle by the wing, like a rag doll. The rest of the flock shrieks and swerves, and I’m dimly aware that I’m screaming with them. Crow reaches for my hand. His cheeks are blotched red with fright.

  Just as another sky-wolf springs, a bone-splitting BOOM throttles the sky and echoes off the mountain, almost shaking my spirit loose.

  ‘Riders, low! Hackles is spewing!’ yell
s Lunda. The draggles swoop suddenly and our net falls through the air for a beat.

  Then huge ice-boulders slam overhead. They smash the front ranks of the sky-wolves to pieces of mist, leaving only the splintered ghosts of their howls.

  The sky-wolves fall back, becoming a grey, snarling wall behind us. And when another marrow-shattering boom rocks the sky, they turn tail and race away, the rear ranks torn apart by massive clumps of ice. Shock tugs at my mouth.

  We’re dragged higher and higher still, until we’re level with the clouds. Crow turns grey and cradles his head in his hands.

  The mountain looms.

  Sparrow moans, soft as a bone pipe, but when I call to him he don’t open his eyes and shakes wrack his body.

  ‘Stay in the waking world, too-soon,’ I murmur in his ear. My little brother was born before he was baked proper. I ent letting him leave me too soon as well.

  The mountain is a black wall blotting out the world beyond. A great wound in its side oozes ice. A churning sound buzzes in the air, and I can feel a bowstring-tenseness that tells me it’s waiting to spew again.

  We dip and swerve to the right, towards a chink in the rock. Behind us, ice boulders thunder through the air, spat out by the mountain range.

  Then we’re hovering, trapped between the ice-bombs behind and the bleak cracked mountain ahead. The gap in the rock is packed with raging winds and swirling snow.

  Lunda and the other riders shout into the wind and raise their arms high. They urge their draggles through the gap in the mountain. I squeeze Sparrow’s hand as we fly between two of the mountain’s jags, through a mass of cloud.

  We’re only halfway through when the cloud begins to freeze around us, tightening, icing our garb to our skin, squeezing . . .

  Up ahead, the riders shout panicked words that are lost in the storm.

  Then we’re through the gap and the storm’s behind us and we can breathe. When I look back, there’s just a broiling mass of lightning, fog and frozen cloud.

  The mountain echoes with the high shrieks and open-throated grunts of eagles. Inside my cloak, Thaw hisses.

  There’s no trace of the world we came from.

  We plunge downwards. My belly flips. I peek through a gap in the raindrop net and the ground is rushing closer. Closer.  Closer.

  I squeeze Sparrow tight and tuck my face into his neck, bracing for the hit. Crow grabs onto Sparrow too, and our wide eyes fasten together in panic.

  Snow squabbles in the air. A snowflake pastes onto my eyeball – I scrub it away – and when I look through the net again there’s a smoky shape pressing up through the snow. My heart clambers into my throat.

  The mountain is a jagged, ring-shaped fortress surrounding a settlement, like a bristling beast squatting gleefully over a kill. Spiny turrets are chiselled into the rock.

  We thud into a snowdrift that guzzles sound. The net sags heavily onto us, sticking to our faces. I reach up to push it off, scraping my scar, and curse, sucking my teeth against the pain. Wind rushes overhead, snagging the raindrops in its grip, as the draggle flock glides past to land nearby. ‘Did the storm-barrier keep them out?’ calls a fretful voice.

  ‘Of course!’ snaps Lunda.

  Crow wrestles with the net. ‘Help me get this thing open.’ He pushes his fingers between the raindrops and wrenches open a small hole.

  As soon as he’s made it the hole shrinks, so I tug a merwraith scale out of my pocket and try to snick a proper cut. The raindrops buzz and rush to knit back together. ‘Bleeding cockle dung,’ I mutter.

  I take Sparrow’s face in my cold-numbed fingers, whispering to him. He moans, but he won’t wake up. I tighten his cloak around him and pull his hood over his face. Then my ears twitch, and a prickle spreads up my neck. Boots are crunching through the snow.

  I nuzzle my face close to the tough web of clamouring raindrops, and through the drifting whiteness a long-limbed girl has appeared, swamped in a cloak of brown feathers.

  Her copper hair is bundled on top of her head like a tangled nest and her long red skirts billow around a pair of fur-trimmed boots. There’s something bare about her gaunt face; the flash of raw hope she wears is the only light on the mountain.

  She steps nearer, then catches herself and glances around sharply, face turning dull and closed. She fits wooden snow-goggles over her eyes and melts into the snowstorm.

  Lunda scrunches towards us. The raindrops slowly unravel into a thread that slides away along the ground and slurps into her staff.

  Me and Crow thrash upright, pulling up our hoods, and watch as the riders leap off their draggles and hurry towards a row of statues etched into the rock-face. Reckon they must be likenesses of their sky-gods – human-bodied, eagle-headed, terrodyl-clawed. The riders kneel, muttering prayers.

  Other figures battle through the snow to unsaddle their beasts. Then the draggles wheel around and soar into the air.  Huntsniffbloodquickscurrytheybitetheywaitheartsbeatbeatbeat, they whisper, lips stretched into gruesome grins. Their huge shadows pass overhead, together with the sweet, damp stink of their fur.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone your name!’ I whisper to Crow. He nods.

  ‘What happened back there, Spearsister?’ a man calls to Lunda, as he turns from muttering his prayers.

  ‘Cloud-freeze is not part of the barrier,’ says another. ‘We could have been frozen to death!’

  ‘We must make more appeasements to the flicker-gods,’ says a woman, twirling her blade in her fingers.

  ‘When did you last see their lights? Even the gods have turned their backs,’ retorts the first man, lifting his gaze to the scrap of sky pinched between the mountain’s leering jags. More tribesfolk pipe up, their grumblings swelling louder.

  The flicker-gods? I think of the white and green sky-fire that my Tribe call the fire spirits. Instinct makes me tip back my head to look, but there’s no sign of life.

  Lunda glares a warning look. ‘Everything is under our control,’ she hisses. One by one, the tribesfolk fall silent.

  ‘Welcome to Hackles,’ says Lunda, hand on hip as she watches us along the length of her pointed spear. A gloat bubbles onto her face. I tense my muscles to run, though there’s nowhere to go.

  Other riders prowl to join her, staring at us with narrowed eyes.

  I show Lunda the quiet and stormy look Grandma said could seek out all a person’s secrets. Grandma would take no nonsense from these slither-wings, so I hold tight onto the heart-strength that she stitched into my bones and shine it out at the girl. For a beat, Lunda’s fierceness is startled away.

  Then she snarls, knocking me over the head with a spiny knuckle ring. I crouch, cursing and clutching my head.

  Pangolin unwraps her raindrop headdress and stoops to touch Sparrow. I leap forwards with a growl but Crow grabs my wrist.

  ‘Arm’s broken,’ says Pangolin, brushing back her knot of thick braids. She watches Lunda’s face like a mongrel begging for scraps.

  ‘A pantry-squidge could tell that much, Pangolin!’ snipes Lunda, making the other girl flush. She straightens and peers around. ‘Pika! Hey! Over here! Pika! ’

  I follow her stare. To our right is a stone hut, smoke huffing from its chimney. Up ahead a run of steps is carved into the mountain, leading to a set of wooden doors crowned with two crossed spears. A tall boy with white hair and cinnamon skin unfolds himself from the steps and slouches towards us. ‘I heard you.’ His dark eyes sweep Lunda’s face. ‘Half the mountain’s heard you. Think an avalanche must be brewing.’

  ‘Stopper your beak,’ declares Lunda. ‘Take the cripple to the sawbones’ nest while me and Pang get the other sea-creepers to their cells.’

  Crow scowls.

  ‘You ent taking him anywhere without me!’ I hiss.

  ‘The draggles are hunting.’ Pika folds his arms wearily. ‘I have to be ready to stable them when they return, and the caves are a mess after you left in such a clamour.’

  ‘Do not defy me, apprentice, or I’ll have y
ou mucking out the draggle-dung well past midnight!’ Lunda spits, flicking her stubby white braid off her shoulder.

  The boy snorts but he does as she says. He bends to pick Sparrow up and my brother’s head lolls like his neck’s gonna snap. He looks smaller than it’s even possible to be.

  ‘Don’t take him! We stay together!’

  ‘Mouse,’ mutters Crow. ‘Just let them help him.’

  ‘Help him? You seen this place, slackwit?’

  He wipes his sweaty brow with the back of his hand. ‘She told that boy to take Sparrow to the sawbones – that’s another word for healer. Know any other healers round here?’

  The heart-truth of his words melts away my fight. But when the boy turns his back to carry my brother away, a hollow pit tears open inside me. ‘I’m coming with him!’ I shout. Then a wave of sky-sickness makes me so dizzy I can barely stand.

  I pull away from Crow and bend forwards, gulping for air, as Sparrow’s carried towards the stone steps in the mountain. I straighten in time to see him vanish from sight.

  Then there’s just all these pairs of strange eyes fixed on me. And no friend but Crow; a boy who not so long ago I couldn’t trust a stitch. Feels like my blubber’s been turned inside out.

  Crow’s telling me something but his face swims before my eyes and his voice is stars away. Then everything blurs, and hands grab us. Thaw-Wielder pokes her head out of my cloak and nips at a rider.

  ‘Oohhch!’ the rider squeals, sucking the blood from her finger. ‘I think we’ll be having you, hawk-sister!’

  Hah! Bad-blubber not have Thaw! shrills my hawk, dodging and spiralling off into the sky.

  We’re forced apart. Crow’s fighting, I’m hurling threats, but we’re lost in a tangle of fists and spears and shields. ‘Mouse!’ Crow bellows. The wind roars, slashing snow into my eyes, and when I can see again he’s being shoved under the crossed spears and through the wooden doors.

  I’m pushed to the right, towards a doorway etched into the hulking flank of the mountain. Shivering figures shovel snow, others snap icicles from overhanging rocks and there’s a clatter-clang-clatter as they drop them into cauldrons for melting. One lingers to warm his hands over the steam, and a rider cracks a whip, knocking him to the ground.