Soul Splinter

by Abi Elphinstone

  Darkebite’s wings bristled, then stretched out either side of her. She stalked over to the far side of the cave, bent down to a ledge of rock and took a dead rat from a cage. She paused for a moment, thinking, then she smiled and lifted a glass bottle from the rock beside the cage and walked back over to the cauldron.

  ‘Behold the Shadow Keeper’s curses,’ she gloated.

  The scales on Ashtongue’s mask quivered with delight as Darkebite let the rat slip into the liquid. Green bubbles belched inside the cauldron, then the Shadow Keeper tipped the contents of the glass bottle in: dozens of fanged teeth. They bobbed on the surface and the liquid hissed and spat before sucking the teeth down.

  The liquid stilled for a moment, then an entire jaw-full of perfectly arranged teeth burst from the surface. They were bigger now – and even sharper than before – and they gnashed together, sending liquid spurting over the edge of the cauldron. Then they sank lower, out of sight.

  But as the teeth disappeared something large and black and scaled pushed through the water beyond the beach. A ridge of fins arched then disappeared and the grate closing in the cave juddered and clanged. Darkebite had awoken something and it brooded beneath the surface of the sea, waiting to be unleashed . . .

  Willow led the children further into the forest, winding in and out of the withered pines, and, wherever she went, the glow shimmering on her fingertips seemed to fall like drops of rain on to the forest around them: bark toughened, branches bore shimmering autumn leaves again and bracken that had wilted shone green.

  Siddy and Alfie walked alongside Willow, asking questions about the Otherworld, while Scrap listened intently: were there really mer kingdoms at the bottom of the sea, as Hard-Times Bob had suggested? Was it true goblins lived in the clouds and unicorns came out under full moons? But Moll hung back from them all with Gryff. She had already trusted Ashtongue’s bone reading and look where that had landed them. Moll’s trust was hard to earn and Willow wasn’t just going to sweep in and steal it. She may have helped them against Darkebite’s owls, but Moll wasn’t letting her guard down too soon.

  They came to a murky river that wove a sluggish course through the trees, but, when Willow stooped from the bank and swished her hand through the shallows, the water rippled brighter and quickened through the forest.

  ‘This river comes in from the marshland,’ Willow said, ‘then flows right through the forest out across the countryside to the sea.’

  Scrap blew her whistle enthusiastically.

  Alfie looked at her. ‘I think that means we’re following it to the Blinking Eye . . .’

  Scrap beamed proudly and nodded.

  Siddy looked at Hermit in his palm and smiled fondly. ‘Hermit’s extremely excited about the prospect of seeing the sea again, aren’t you?’ The crab waved one pincer feebly.

  Scrap stripped down to her vest and pants and jumped from the bank into the river. Alfie and Siddy followed, glad to be shaking off the mud that had clung to their clothes since their encounter with the marsh spirit, even if the water was cold. But Moll sat on the bank with Gryff, her arms folded across her knees.

  ‘You don’t trust me, do you?’ Willow said quietly, sitting down beside Moll. She let her plait trail down the bank.

  Moll watched as Alfie and Siddy swung Scrap by her legs and arms, then flung her into the water. She felt for Gryff’s paw and ran her hand over it.

  ‘Trusting gets me into scrapes. I followed what I thought was an Oracle Bone reading, but it turned out to be one of the Shadowmasks trying to trap me. And now Oak is injured and Alfie . . .’ She looked away. ‘Alfie isn’t even properly real, no matter what we all say.’ Her eyes stung with the truth of it, as though she was betraying her friend by saying it out loud. She blinked back the tears and plucked at the reeds. ‘Everything’s so – so—’ she struggled for the right word, missed it and ended up with ‘—knotty.’

  Willow nodded. ‘Life is rarely clear-cut and simple. You’ve got to search through the knots to find out what you believe in, even if others doubt you.’ She looked out over the river and Moll glanced at the blue-green markings curling over Willow’s cheekbones; they glittered in the sun. ‘Your wildcat, Gryff, he trusts me,’ Willow said after a while.

  Moll looked at Gryff as he licked his fur clean. It was true; Gryff wouldn’t be so comfortable with a stranger if there was anything to fear.

  ‘I knew your name before I met you, Moll. I’ve known you since the day Gryff found you in Tanglefern Forest – when you were only two years old and the Shadowmasks killed your parents.’ Willow leant closer to Moll. ‘Only the old magic could know you like this – even the Shadowmasks had no idea who you were at first. But you’re part of the Bone Murmur, part of the old magic. Just like me.’

  Moll bit her lip, wanting to trust but doubting too hard.

  ‘What if I told you something about Gryff only you know?’ Willow said. ‘Would you trust me then?’

  Moll stared at the river for a very long time, then she looked up. ‘Yes, I would. Because no one knows Gryff like I do. It would have to be a great old magic to know the things I know.’

  ‘Gryff is strong,’ Willow said. ‘No matter whether his soles are cut or his skin is nicked by owl blades, he always fights back. He’s always there to protect you.’

  Moll nodded and the pride she felt for the wildcat almost brought her to her feet. It made her fierce and ready, willing to risk everything there and then.

  ‘But Gryff has a weakness,’ Willow said, ‘a vulnerability that only you know. You’ve no idea why you know, but deep down you do. Because the bond between you and Gryff goes deeper than understanding and reason.’

  Moll’s body stiffened and Willow leant in so close her voice was barely more than a whisper in her ear. But Moll heard the words and she listened to their truth.

  And, when Willow pulled away, Moll said, ‘I trust you.’

  Willow smiled, then she and Moll watched Alfie, Siddy and Scrap splashing in the rapids. Dragonflies pinged together above the shallows and, further upstream, in a calm pool of water, a fish jumped. Moll looked on. This was a world where promises got broken and darkness lurked, but it was also a world of sparkling rivers, hidden pools and friends who stuck by you – it was a sort of broken beauty that Moll was only just beginning to understand. She turned to Willow. ‘Can I ask you something?’

  Willow nodded.

  ‘When the Shadowmasks killed my parents with their Soul Splinter, they shaved their heads.’ Moll picked at the cuff of her coat. ‘Oak and the other Elders don’t know why. But if you’re the old magic then I reckon you might.’

  Willow shifted beside her and said nothing for several seconds, then she took a deep breath. ‘The Shadowmasks needed your parents’ hair for thread.’ Her cheekbones tightened and she shook her head. ‘I can’t say any more; there’s too much at stake. You and Gryff have to find out the rest for yourselves – like Alfie, I can’t reveal more than you’re ready to know.’

  Moll’s mind reeled with thoughts. Thread? What kind of thread needed hair? A weight settled in her stomach. Thread meant stitching, making. Were the Shadowmasks creating something? The thought of that turned Moll’s insides to ice. She shook herself; that kind of thinking wouldn’t help them find the amulet. She needed to focus on that for now and concentrate on getting to the Blinking Eye.

  Moll looked up and listened to the wood pigeons cooing. ‘I know you’re probably extremely busy with—’ she paused, ‘magic, but I wondered if you could do something for me?’

  ‘Go on,’ Willow said.

  ‘I wondered if you could check that Oak is OK back in Little Hollows.’ She glanced at Willow quickly. ‘If you have time.’

  Willow beamed. ‘Of course. Oak has done so much to protect you and to restore the old magic. I’ll visit him before I return to the Otherworld.’

  The coldness that had fastened round Moll’s heart every time she thought of Oak thawed a little. Wriggling out of her mud-crusted coat and
jumper until she was just in her dress, Moll hurried along the bank towards the others and leapt into the river.

  She sank beneath the surface to where it was cold and quiet and where her thoughts belonged just to her. And, when she popped up, she swam over to Siddy and dunked him down hard. Alfie grinned, then swiped at her, but she kicked away to where Scrap was splashing and for a while, as they dived and wrestled and kicked, it was just them and the river. Nothing else seemed to matter. Moll threw her head back and laughed at the thrill of it. The Tribe had needed this, she realised – she and Alfie had needed this – and there in the river it felt as if nothing had happened to pull them apart.

  Hours later, Willow led them on through the trees and by twilight they had reached the edge of the forest where the river widened, gurgling over large rocks and cutting a channel through the countryside. There were trees here and there along its banks – ash, alder and poplar – but mostly the countryside was wild with long grasses and flowers lining an almost forgotten path beside the river. There was no sign of dark magic having passed this way at all.

  Moll glanced to her left beyond the forest and took in the dark shapes of the hills in the distance. She’d heard Oak talking of the snow-capped mountains in the northern parts of the country and the Bone Murmur spoke of the ‘beast . . . from lands full wild’ – an old expression for the northern wilderness. Perhaps that really was where Gryff had come from; perhaps that was his home. But as she looked down at him now, his eyes trained on the river, she felt thankful he’d left to be with her. Moll gripped her boxing gloves talisman; if they could get to the Blinking Eye before the Shadowmasks returned for them, everything would be all right, and she would be in with a chance of freeing her ma’s soul.

  Willow turned to them. ‘I can’t go any further with you, but I can give you something that may help against the Shadowmasks.’

  Siddy breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thank goodness. I wasn’t looking forward to facing Darkebite with just a catapult.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘So what have you got for us? Giant knives? Pistols? Shotguns?’

  Willow smiled, then she lifted both her hands and began twisting and turning them through the air, as if drawing in the dusk with invisible paints. A silvery glow slipped from her fingertips, swirling into unrecognisable shapes. Then the glow floated down before her feet, a web of silver shapes, and hardened into something real, into objects begging to be touched. Willow reached down and handed three shining bows to Alfie, Moll and Siddy.

  Moll noticed Scrap’s face fall so she whispered to her to come close, held out her catapult and placed it in Scrap’s hands. Scrap grinned, pulled back on the rubber pouch and scurried into a rhododendron bush to collect ammunition.

  The wood of the bow was smooth, silvery and strong; Moll recognised it immediately. ‘Silver birch,’ she murmured. ‘A tree that grants protection.’

  ‘The string,’ Alfie gasped. ‘It’s so fine it’s almost not there at all! Surely that’ll snap in seconds?’

  Siddy groaned. ‘We were better off with our catapults.’

  Willow placed her palm on to the string of Alfie’s bow. ‘Feel it again,’ she said.

  Alfie frowned. ‘It’s cold!’

  ‘It’s a moonbeam spun across each of your bows – as strong as iron but as thin as gossamer,’ Willow explained. ‘It’ll never snap. This is what I used to fight the owls.’ She twisted more silver shapes in the air before them and a moment later three leather quivers filled with arrows lay at their feet. The arrows themselves seemed to have been carved from silver birch, fletched with white owl feathers, but each tip was sharpened metal, inscribed with an Oracle Bone symbol.

  Moll traced hers with her finger, a small dash inside a circle. ‘It means Hope,’ she said, turning the arrow over in her hand. Then she looked at Siddy’s, a square cut through with a line: ‘Courage.’ She turned one of Alfie’s arrows over: two interlinked circles. ‘Yours means Friendship.’

  Willow nodded. ‘Though sometimes you might feel alone – that things are hopeless, your courage is faltering and friendships aren’t as straightforward as you’d thought,’ Moll glanced at Alfie, ‘know that together you can do anything. You can beat the darkness that stalks this world. Those arrows will snare anything fighting against the Bone Murmur.’ Willow pointed upwards. ‘Like these trees poisoned by the Shadowmasks’ evil. But they won’t work against those who know nothing of such magic.’

  Alfie blew his hair away from his eyes, fitted the moonbeam with an arrow and pulled back. He closed one eye against his target – a crow’s nest hanging in a withered tree – then fired. The arrow thrummed from the bow, spiralled through the air, then, just as it hit the nest, a billowing cape shot out from the tip, curled round the twigs and yanked them down. The nest crunched as it split apart inside the cape, then it thumped to the ground, a tangle of broken sticks. The cape hung above it, like smoke from a recently snuffed candle, then it was gone. A flicker of disbelief crossed Alfie’s face.

  ‘What was that white cape that came out of the arrowhead?’ Moll asked.

  ‘A spirit,’ Willow answered. ‘And, though it seems to disappear, it is bound to the arrow tip and, so long as you can find your arrow, you can use the spirit again.’ She smiled. ‘The spirits you learnt about when you were younger – wind spirits, earth spirits, river spirits, sea spirits – they all came from the old magic in the Otherworld when Time first dawned. But what you have inside your arrow tips is Oracle Spirit, the most powerful one of all. And somehow Alfie knew how to unleash it.’

  Alfie blushed. ‘I’m not sure I did. I was just thinking about something when I fired. Everything around me sort of slipped away, then, when I fired, somehow I knew I wouldn’t miss.’

  ‘An impossible dream,’ Willow said quietly. ‘To unlock the Oracle Spirit you have to believe in an impossible dream – something you want more than anything in the world, something that you hope for even when you’re not thinking about it.’

  Moll looked at the Oracle Bone script engraved on the tip of an arrow and thought of her parents, of Oak lying ill in his hammock, of the lurking Shadowmasks. So many impossibilities.

  ‘You must never tell anyone else what your impossible dream is,’ Willow said. And then she added, in an even quieter voice, ‘Unless you feel they really need to know.’

  Moll slid a glance at Alfie. She didn’t need to ask what he’d been thinking about.

  Willow gathered the group beside the river, a dark ribbon snaking away from the forest through the countryside. Above it, clouds hung in the sky, opening now and again to reveal the moon, strung up like a silver coin.

  ‘This is where I must leave you,’ Willow said. ‘But I’ll be watching from afar – we all will. Keep heart and have faith, however bleak things seem.’

  Moll shuddered. Willow had stayed with them for several hours, helping them practise with their bows and arrows, and while she had been beside them the threat of the Shadowmasks had dimmed; they’d even made a campfire and eaten a rabbit Gryff had killed for them. But as they got ready to leave, a sense of menace brooded in the air.

  Willow nodded towards Moll’s quiver. ‘May I?’

  Moll shook it from her back and Willow set an arrow to the moonbeam, took aim at a low-hanging branch leaning over the river and fired. The Oracle Spirit billowed out, but, instead of snatching round the branch and hauling it down, it held fast, pinned to the bough where the arrow had jammed, and, like a hammock made from moonlight, the rest of the cape hung down in front of them, swaying slowly in the breeze. They clustered before it on the riverbank, their eyes wide.

  Willow handed the bow back to Moll, then stretched out a hand and slipped it inside the cape. ‘Go on, touch it,’ she whispered.

  They held out their hands and let their fingers brush against the Oracle Spirit; it was softer than satin, smoother than silk, and yet it felt strong too, as if it would never break.

  Willow slipped her body inside a gap in the folds and sat there, her legs
dangling out. ‘If you need protection – if you can’t fight any more – think of the Otherworld instead of your impossible dream and the Oracle Spirit will form a cocoon and keep you safe.’ She paused and looked at each one of them in turn. ‘When you’re inside, nothing can harm you, but you can only use your arrows in this way once, so use them wisely.’ She drew her legs in and wrapped the Oracle Spirit round her so that all the children could see was a pale cocoon of silk hanging from the branch.

  ‘That’s brilliant!’ Siddy cried. ‘We can hide inside them and the Shadowmasks won’t be able to touch us!’

  Moll stretched out a hand and pulled the fold of material back.

  Willow was gone, as Moll had almost expected, and they were alone again in the forest. Taking a deep breath, Moll scrambled up the tree, using the jutting branches like rungs of a ladder, then pulled hard on the arrow holding the cape and it came away. The second it did so, the Oracle Spirit vanished, locked back inside the arrow, and just a wisp of grey hung in the air.

  Moll jumped down from the tree, slipped the arrow into her quiver and swung it on to her back. ‘Let’s get going. Come on, Scrap, lead the way.’

  They stepped out of the forest on to the path lining the riverbank. It was almost entirely overgrown by long grasses and wild flowers, but they followed it along the river’s meandering course, south towards the coast. Moll felt for the leather strap of her quiver and held it tight.

  After a mile of walking, Scrap stopped and turned to the others, her expression tense. Gryff craned his neck through the reeds towards the river, his tail slung low to the ground, his whiskers twitching. He’d seen something: Moll knew the signs. She reached for her bow and listened.

  Something was stepping through the still waters lapping the reeds. The moonlight shivered. Then there was a splash, reeds shook and a large bird burst up from the riverbank and flapped off into the night.