Moonlight and Ashes

by Sophie Masson

  ‘East! But that’s going inland, towards the forest lands, not towards the coast at all!’

  I swallowed. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s impossible,’ he said, sharply. ‘I can read a compass, you know. And it was definitely pointing –’

  ‘North, I know. It wasn’t your fault.’ I took a deep breath. ‘You see, I think the compass had a spell on it.’

  Olga’s mouth dropped open. ‘Surely you do not say Andel –’

  ‘No, no, it wasn’t Andel, of course not. It was that lady who died. She – she had it in her hand when I woke up.’

  Three pairs of eyes stared at me. ‘What are you talking about?’ said Max, confused.

  ‘You see, she was a m– that is, she was a witch,’ I corrected, hastily, nobody seeming to notice my slip.

  ‘She told you that?’ said Olga, warily.

  ‘Not in so many words, but – yes, now I come to think of it, that’s what she meant.’

  ‘But why would she put a spell on this?’ Max said, taking the compass from the bag and staring at it as though it would give him a clue.

  ‘She must have known that we were in trouble,’ I improvised, rapidly. ‘She wanted to help us, wanted us to be safe.’ With a little tremor, I remembered her last words, Then you will be on the right path, little sister . . . ‘She must have thought Silver Harbour wouldn’t be safe so she put a spell on the compass to bring us here instead.’

  Tomi’s eyes bulged. He jumped up from his chair and yelled, ‘Oh, we are doomed! We are in the house of a wicked witch and she will turn us all into frogs and I will never, ever see my home or my mother and father again!’ He burst into loud, frightened sobs.

  We all moved towards him, but it was Olga who reached him first. She put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Don’t be afraid, little man. Don’t be afraid.’

  ‘Don’t touch me! I hate you, I hate you all! I wish I had never seen you in my whole life! Oh I don’t want to be a frog; I hate frogs, I hate them, horrible, slimy things they are!’ He was screaming hysterically by this time.

  ‘It’s all right, Tomi, it’s all right,’ said Olga, gently, as she knelt down beside him and put an arm around him. She held him till his screams died down and his sobs quietened, till he hardly even struggled against her. Then she stroked his hair and said, firmly, ‘You will not be a frog, Tomi, I swear it. Not a frog, nor a toad, nor anything but Tomi, not while I am here, for no wicked witch or wizard get past werewolf, that I promise you!’

  I had no idea if that was true – but she was the only one of us here who had a good deal of experience of magic, so it rang true, and it certainly helped to calm the little boy.

  He looked miserable and hung his head. ‘I . . . I am so ashamed.’

  ‘Of what, Tomi?’ whispered Olga.

  ‘I am a Mancer. Nothing should frighten me.’

  Poor little Tomi, I thought. His world had turned upside down and he was still trying to live up to something he only half understood.

  ‘Listen to me, Tomi,’ Max said gently. ‘A very great Mancer once said to my father that is only those without honour who claim to know neither fear nor shame.’

  Tomi looked at him. ‘Is that really true?’

  ‘It is the absolute truth,’ said Max, steadily, and as he did I saw the expression in the boy’s eyes change and soften. I knew that the young man had once again found the right words to appeal to and comfort that fierce little heart.

  After that, somehow, it felt all right to help ourselves to the stew and the bread and the other good things that had been left out for us. We took the lead, and after watching us cautiously, Tomi soon joined in and ate heartily. Nothing happened to us, of course, other than our bellies becoming pleasantly full. Then we found some board games in a chest by the door and spent a pleasant hour or two playing snakes and ladders before Tomi fell asleep in a bedroll by the stove.

  We talked then for quite a while about what had happened. Olga and Max asked a few questions about the dying woman, which I answered as best I could. The moon-sister hadn’t said in so many words to tell no-one about Dremda and Thalia, though I knew she had chosen a moment when everyone else was asleep. Moreover, she had not trusted to persuasion only; with the compass spell, she had ensured we would have a night of respite: safe, warm and well-fed. And I was sure it had killed her. The effort of the spell must have drained the very last of her forces, so even the small time that was left to her had been cut brutally short. I owed it to her to do what I had promised. But I couldn’t reveal the real reason why she’d so desperately wanted us off our course; and so I had to improvise and embroider on my theme of ‘the witch’ wanting to protect us.

  Fortunately enough, both Olga and Max seemed to accept this. After all, there was no real reason not to. We had indeed been lucky with the kindness of strangers so far. And a secret witch would be even more likely to want to protect fugitives from the authorities than a bargeman and a nun. We discussed why she’d brought us to this particular spot and decided that this house, with its spirit of kindly magic, must once have been hers. Why she would leave such a welcoming place for the hospital in Tresholm, though, was a mystery; but perhaps she’d had no choice or been driven out. Or perhaps this place was not quite what it seemed. Remembering how the hazel tree’s magic had faded after a few hours, I wondered if this one was similar. Was that what all moon-sister magic was like – temporary? Would we wake in the morning to find ourselves in the ruins of a broken-down, old house where the moon-sister might once have lived? Still, even if the glamour faded, we’d have had a few precious hours of comfort and safety.

  ‘Though we might have been taken out of our way, it was for the best,’ Max said. ‘After all, we’d been told the road to Silver Harbour was being watched; so why not Silver Harbour itself? We might have been caught there.

  ‘What’s more,’ he said, cheerfully, ‘we could still get to Almain this way, overland. It’s a much longer way, granted, than going by boat, and there’d be a nerve-racking bit when you crossed from Ashbergia into Faustine lands proper, for the border of Almain and the empire meet there; but it is just a far-flung area of remote villages – not any place where Mancers might be likely to lurk.’

  There was just one problem: what to do with Tomi now that we couldn’t leave him at Silver Harbour as planned. Of course, we’d have to let him go somewhere before we entered Almain. Quite where and when, though, we had no idea. He had to be absolutely safe where we left him and we had to be sure that he could be reunited soon with his family. There was no way now that any of us would have it otherwise. For he had stopped being ‘the Mancer brat’ or even ‘the child’ and had become a real person to all of us – even me. He was Tomi, our companion for better or worse, and that made things both easier and harder.

  I am in a forest. It is not a dark forest but green and gold with sunlight filtering through leaves. The grass is lush and there are clumps of flowers growing at the foot of trees. It is a beautiful place, peaceful and quiet but for the rustling of leaves and water nearby. Drawn to the sound, I walk towards it and find a waterfall gushing out over a shelf of rocks into a sparkling pool. The water looks so good I cup my hands to drink it and as I do so, I feel a tap on my shoulder.

  I turn – it is not my mother this time, but a young girl. I do not know her name and yet I recognise her at once, though she looks very different from when I last saw her. It is the moon-sister from the wagon.

  She is smiling. For an instant we look at each other, then she turns and walks rapidly towards the waterfall, while I am rooted to the spot, watching her. She does not hesitate at the water’s edge but walks right in, through the veil of water, and vanishes, and I am left alone in a dazzle of sunlight that is pouring onto my face.

  I opened my eyes to a beautiful morning, a sky rinsed a clear blue by last night’s rain, to find myself alone, lying curled up in a
soft, dry tangle of straw, bracken and fern, under a roof long fallen in and open to the sky, held up only by a frail wooden skeleton of walls. Everything else was gone: the room, the furniture, the food, the outbuildings and all the animals. I’d been right. It had been a temporary glamour.

  As rested as if I had been in a feather bed all night, I got up in search of the others and found them not far off, in the wildly overgrown orchard, picking apples from an old tree. Tomi, riding on Max’s shoulders, plucked fruit from the higher branches. I watched them for a moment thinking what a peaceful scene it looked. I do not know if it was indeed the moon-sister’s home, or more likely, some kind of safe house she knew from back in the old days, between the forest lands and the road to Ashberg. Whatever it once was, there was still a kindly spirit hovering, and I felt that nothing bad could touch us while we were in its warm, gentle, and oddly timeless hold.‘Thank you, sister,’ I whispered to the air. ‘Thank you for taking care of us,’ and then I went to join the others.

  The apples were delicious, the flesh a meltingly snow-white, the skin rosy and fragrant. They made a perfect breakfast, washed down with fresh, clear water from the stream below the ruins of the house.

  ‘It’s odd, but it’s almost as perfect here this morning as it was last night,’ said Max and we all knew what he meant.

  Even Tomi, who confessed that he’d dreamed he was a frog sitting on a lily pad, but in the dream he didn’t mind so much because, as he said, ‘I could jump so very high, like this!’ And he jumped around in a pretty good imitation of a frog, and we all laughed. This was the first time, I thought, the very first time, I had ever heard him laugh.

  By and by, we packed some more apples into our knapsack, filled the empty ginger beer bottle with water, and set off. We followed the stream up, and followed the sun, too, for Max wasn’t sure he wanted to trust to the compass any more (though I was sure that the spell on the compass had faded like last night’s magic and that it would point true, especially now we were doing what the moon-sister wanted us to do).

  At first we were in open country but soon we entered the woods. This wasn’t the forest proper, just its outskirts. The stream became a little brook, then a rivulet, which then turned into a spring bubbling from a rock, where we stopped to drink. At first, we had seen no-one, but just a short way into the woods, we began to pass people: woodcutters, charcoal-burners, herb-gatherers, a rabbit-hunter who sold us one of the skinned rabbits hanging from a pole over his shoulder. He looked surprised when we told him we wanted to go to the forest and told us that if we walked briskly in a certain direction, we should reach a hamlet called Smutny by nightfall, on the very edge of the deep forest. He told us he hadn’t been that way in a long while but believed it was possible we might find some form of shelter there. But why didn’t we go instead in the other direction, which would be easier going and lead to the main road, not to mention one or two comfortable inns?

  We thanked him but said we had to go this way.

  He shook his head and said, ‘Well then, I’ll be wishing you luck.’ Then he very kindly gave us some dried, salted mushrooms, telling us that if we soaked them in a little water, they would make a fine sauce for the rabbit. He was a nice man – the only person we met that day who was anything like what you might call nice, or even civil. The other passers-by seemed surprised to be greeted with Max’s cheerful ‘Good morning’, and looked at him warily before scuttling away, so that soon he stopped doing it.

  ‘I thought that country people were supposed to be much friendlier than city folk,’ he complained, when we stopped for a quick lunch of apples and water.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘That’s a city idea. We’re used to strangers, they’re not. They probably take you for an escaped lunatic to be got away from as quickly as possible.’

  ‘Well, thanks very much,’ said Max, indignantly, when we all burst out laughing.

  We kept walking and time passed uneventfully. Tomi grew tired and had to be carried again. Because we’d only had more apples and water for lunch, so as not to stop for too long, the thought of a roast rabbit dinner with mushroom sauce was beginning to seriously disturb my thoughts well before the shadows of afternoon had begun to lengthen, so that by the time we were within sight of Smutny, I was absolutely ravenous. And I wasn’t the only one.

  Smutny was a miserable sort of hamlet of about a dozen houses in various states of disrepair, and the welcome was about as warm as you might expect. In fact most people simply refused to talk to us at all. At last we were rather grudgingly sold some bread by the village headman, a wizened old fellow with sly blue eyes, who told us that we could spend the night in the village barn – a crumbling affair which smelt of mouldy hay – and gather some wood for a fire (both of which had to be paid for with the last of Andel’s coins). But when Max tentatively asked him if he knew of anyone who might guide us to the border, or any maps to consult, he was flatly refused, with the door slammed in his face.

  These were the forest lands. My mother’s country. When I was little, she used to tell me such jolly stories about her village, Stromsa; about mushroom-gathering and berry hunts, feasts of roast boar and deer around the fire, and of course the tradition of giving honey, cream and roses to girls on their sixteenth birthday. It had seemed so beautiful and I had always wondered why on earth she had never wanted to go back. Now I thought I understood. She had painted a rosy glow over things because she had needed something to hold on to. Life in Ashberg had proved disappointing; but life in this region was hard, and hearts harder still. For my poor mother, there was no going back, and nowhere she could truly be at home, except in golden stories of once upon a time.

  Yet maybe I was making too much of it. Smutny wasn’t Stromsa, after all. I had no idea where exactly my mother’s village lay in relation to this place, and it was no use asking these people, they seemed to think any bit of information was too precious to let out of their mouths, certainly not without a coin in return.

  I woke out of an uneasy sleep knowing at once that something was wrong. I lifted my head cautiously out of the straw. Everything was quiet and dark. It was the middle of the night and the waxing moon only faintly lit things so I could see, to one side, the soundly sleeping shapes of Max and Tomi, the little boy huddled up close to the young man. To the other, Olga was not lying asleep but had her back to me, she was over by our things and . . .

  I realised it wasn’t Olga at all! The shape and size were all wrong. Without even stopping to think I crept quietly to where the intruder was rummaging through our things. He was so intent on what he was doing that he didn’t notice me until I was nearly upon him; then with a strangled gasp, he leapt forwards with surprising speed, making a dive for the ladder that led up to the hayloft. He scrambled down with me in hot pursuit and before he even managed to get halfway across the floor below, I had knocked him to the ground.

  The wizened old man with the sly blue eyes looked up at me fearfully. I’d disliked him yesterday on sight; this certainly didn’t improve that impression.

  ‘I can explain,’ he quavered.

  ‘You’d better. What have you done to Olga – to my friend?’

  ‘Nothing, I swear it,’ he stammered. ‘I saw the girl go a little while ago.’

  ‘Go? Go where?’

  ‘Into the forest,’ he said, promptly.

  I remembered the green glow of longing in Olga’s eyes, as she had finished sucking on the last of the roast rabbit, and knew at once why she’d gone into the forest in the middle of the night. The rabbit had been delicious but not quite enough for four people, especially not for a werewolf who could hunt.

  ‘That doesn’t explain what you were doing rattling around in our things.’

  ‘I was just looking,’ he said, sulkily.

  ‘What were you looking for?’

  He shot me a sly glance. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Give me what
you took.’

  ‘I took nothing,’ he protested.

  But I slipped a hand into the inner pocket of his greasy coat and took out first the compass, and then something small, hard and shiny.

  ‘My locket!’ I said, without stopping to think. The compass had been in the knapsack he’d been rifling through, but not the locket. That had been in my jacket pocket. He must have taken it before he’d even started going through the bag. I saw the amusement in his eyes. Yesterday, he hadn’t seen through my boy-disguise; but now he knew I was a girl. My skin crawled at the thought of those hands on me. I wanted to hit him; but stopped myself in time. Instead, I said, menacingly, ‘Why did you take these?’

  ‘To sell, of course. Why do you think?’

  His voice had a mocking edge now and it riled me.

  ‘You miserable thief,’ I said, furiously, losing my temper now, and shaking him like a rat. ‘So help me God I’ll teach you a lesson you won’t forget.’

  I saw the fear was back in his eyes. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘please, Miss.’ The mocking tone was quite gone from his voice. ‘I am sorry, I am very sorry. I am poor, I just –’

  ‘We gave you all our money already, you disgusting object,’ I hissed. ‘We are homeless strangers – guests in your village. I was always told that the people of the forest were so hospitable. And yet look at you – look at this place! What is wrong with you people?’

  He laughed bitterly. ‘What is wrong with you people?’ he mimicked. ‘Why, my lady, would you ask the dead that question, too?’

  I released my hold on him. ‘What?’

  ‘We are dead,’ he said and sat up, painfully. He turned his pale gaze on me. It was no longer sly, but bleak. ‘Or we may as well be. Our villages are emptying, our women don’t bear children, our crops fail, our animals don’t thrive and our streams are drying up. Some say we are cursed.’