by Helen Slavin
“Drawbridge Brewery, Charlie Way speaking. How can I help?” She heard how grumpy and unhelpful she sounded.
“Charlie? It’s me again. Cadenza. Congratulations.” In contrast, Cadenza Rightman’s voice was celebratory. Charlie was puzzled. Had she missed a conversation somewhere? Something else vital that Michael had not bothered to tell her about, putting her on the back foot again. Still, Cadenza was very approachable.
“Congratulations? Not sure what you’re talking about, Cadenza.”
“Your new promotion.” There was a small gasp at the other end. “Oh, shit, have I jumped the gun? Is it not official yet?” Cadenza sounded jokey, not a prank but relaxed.
Promotion? Of course, Charlie was being dense. They were launching the new beer. Michael must at least have been on the ball for one of the Post-It notes last month and sent Cadenza the promo stuff for the new brew.
“No, no, not at all. It’s ready to go. You can order it anytime, that’s why Michael sent you the promo mailout.”
It was Cadenza’s turn to be confused. “Mailout? What order?”
Charlie’s heart thudded. Had Michael really lost this contract? What was the problem?
“I’m sorry, I think we’re crossing wires. I thought you were ordering the new brew we’re promoting… Drown Your Sorrows? It was in the mailout. Did Michael…”
Cadenza made an odd, squeaking sound that Charlie could not translate. This was the worst thing about phones. Charlie liked to see people’s faces.
“Oh, flip. I’m putting my foot in it, I think. I was ringing you about Ivan and the Brewery.”
Charlie’s heart stopped thudding and began a slow, heavy manoeuvre that was like all the air siphoning out of a vast and unwieldy hot air balloon. She was not sure she could breathe.
“Ivan. Herald?” She gasped the words out, her mind shimmering with brandy glasses and gold dresses. A card, turned.
“God, yes.” Cadenza was bright and perky. “You lucky cow. Wish he’d buy shares in us. Anyhoo, now he’s bought out Michael and made you General Manager, you’ll be able to…”
Charlie did not hear what she might be able to do. It was squeaks and gasps until her name sounded, repeatedly, with concern.
“Charlie? Charlie? Oh bum, didn’t you know?” Cadenza’s distress squeaked down the line before she hung up.
Time passed. Charlie worked out what was missing from the office; Michael’s jacket, kept for meetings, hanging on the back of the door. The desk was bare, save for the computer. She realised now he had been loading up his belongings when she cornered him. She thought of his face angled downwards, unable to look at her.
She spelt the message out on five simple Post-Its:
I Q U I T
More time ticked over and took her to the safer haven of The Orangery. Hot water splashed. Sunlight picked out metallic colours in the suds. Charlie’s hands, soft and pruney.
“Hey.”
Charlie looked up from her task to the rafters of the kitchen at the back of The Orangery. It was cool and calm here. Emz was finishing up the drying, folding the teacloth over the rail by the window. Outside, the last of the cars was reversing out.
“Hey.” Anna’s hand was on her shoulder. “Great job, thanks so much.” She smiled. The worktable and surfaces were cleaned down, Anna peeling off her Orangery pinny. “How was the brewery?”
Charlie was all set to brush this aside, to tell them of events with a wry smile and joke, but her thoughts were shadowed suddenly by the swish of a dark dress made of feathers and the ace of hearts, blood red. Charlie started to cry, small soft sobs from a place buried deep.
The Orangery was a calming space. Charlie liked the gentle, stony cool of the building and the way sounds echoed around. The skylights and the floor-length panes, which looked out across the back lawns, drew the eye out. She could see the trees of Leap Woods waving in the evening breeze, the twilight hues of the sky.
The really calming thing, she understood, was her sisters and the sound of them chatting beside her, their faces when she looked up. Emz smiling, Anna laughing, however briefly, seemed precious. She couldn’t remember when they had last laughed or smiled.
“Post-It notes.” Emz smiled at the thought again. “Classic Charlie,” she said, as Anna’s laugh diminished and her face grew mock serious.
“I’ve got an idea… now you’ve quit Drawbridge, you can set up a microbrewery here,” Anna said. “I’m sure Winn would be up for it.” She looked over at Emz for agreement.
Emz nodded. “Don’t doubt it. There are loads of outbuildings. Winn is up for anything like that. Local enterprise.”
Charlie thought for a moment. “Why don’t I think that’s a completely mad idea?” she asked. She had not thought of that as an option. “I’d just thought I’d wash dishes and usher the weddings. A microbrewery?”
“You know you can. Ask Winn. Maybe set up in the stables or that barn on the other side of the walled…” Emz’s enthusiasm was contagious.
“The barn.” Anna was decisive. “That’d be perfect. It’s an amazing space.”
“We could do brewery tours…” Emz pushed the fantasy.
Charlie shrugged.
“Something to look forward to?” she said with a sad smile. They let the ordinary, everyday matters settle before Charlie spoke up.
“Anyway, the brewery isn’t important. Our priority is hunting down whoever the white-haired woman is.”
They all took an intense breath.
“Hunting down.” Emz said it over.
“This whole thing yells out Trespasser,” Anna agreed.
Charlie shook her head. “Nope. This is our territory, and we know they’re here.” She was pepped up. “Our Beacons are lit. Warning lights.” Charlie banged her fist on the table, rattling the crockery. “Let them watch out.”
Anna salvaged a rolling teacup and looked at Charlie’s shocked face.
“Oh. Sorry. I’m sorry.” Charlie was flushed. “But you feel it? You must? Something has altered, you know. In us.”
Emz nodded.
“It isn’t just Kitty Boyle. I was thinking about the wood, about the crackle with Kitty up at the farm, and the whole glimmer thing with Winn…” Anna confessed.
“Yes. It’s not been like this before,” Charlie said. “When I saw the Beacons, I didn’t have to think. It was…”
“Like breathing,” Emz finished. There was a moment as they connected the thoughts.
“Yes. What’s happened?” Charlie asked.
Anna gave a wry laugh. “Where do you want to start? Grandma Hettie? Seren? Mrs Fyfe? Borrower? M—” She could not finish that last small word. They all registered the silence of it, looked down as if in prayer.
Charlie was the first to look up once more. “In Havoc the other night, it was like an alarm went off.” Anna and Emz stared at her. “The way the Beacons are lit all along the routes I’ve been patrolling since Mu… since December. It’s as if I set them up with my intention… but without realising. I didn’t have to think. It happened.”
“Why though?” Emz asked. “Why is it suddenly different?”
Anna gave a deep sigh. “We are different,” she said. There was a moment as the sisters considered.
It was Emz who spoke up first. “The not-thinking. Instinct. We opened the door.” There was a comfort in that.
Leaving Anna prepping the overnight dough for The Orangery before her own patrol, Charlie and Emz headed out across the lawns to the edge of Leap Woods. Emz was eager for her lone patrol of Leap tonight. The two sisters skirted through the wood. The light was different here. Charlie was surprised. She didn’t feel lost, but nor was she as at ease as when she was in the shadows of Havoc. As she looked into the trees, there were flakes and sparkles, as if the paths within were trying to light up. This had never happened before.
“You feel it, too?” Emz asked, before Charlie had confessed to it.
Charlie nodded. She was not as certain of the territory, though, and
was glad that Emz was so connected to Leap Woods. “You know the place better than any of us. I think it’s good we’ve all got a different territory. We’re on the lookout everywhere,” Charlie said, as they parted company at The Sisters.
Charlie strode up through Havoc, glancing out from the cover of Rook’s Rise. Her heart knocked as she noted that, once more, a light winked out of place close to Hare’s Ell. She breathed in and her Strength breathed out, so that her footsteps were sure and confident as she picked up the trail at the top end of the bridleway.
She stepped onto the track. The Trespasser’s trail was clear to her, familiar from the other evening, so much so that she did not need any assistance from the lights of her Beacons. She could scent them. Strong. Earthen. Like beeswax polish and cold stones. She faltered. Gravestones. She took a brief wrong step as a faint prickle of Mrs Fyfe’s trail nicked at the edge of her senses. Charlie felt panic rush her. But the waft of old apples was nothing more than a thin scrape, old and trodden over. She focused on her heartbeats, pattering like rain. She focused on that, took in a deep breath. She let loose memory of her sisters running with her and looked upwards. The trail lit like thin autumn light, harsh and bringing cold. She had not gone more than ten feet when she saw how the light tried to disguise the shadow, the true trail. The autumn light was a false trail tracking off in a different direction, away to nowhere. Charlie made mental notes of all of this and followed, instead, the true trail, the ragged shadow.
Her heart was thumping in rhythm with her footsteps as she followed the trail to Weaver Lane. It made Charlie uneasy to think how seldom she’d walked through most of town. As she cut down through the Victorian villas of the Wisheart Road end of Woodcastle she felt like a stranger. In all her life she’d probably only been up here four or five times. The seventies and eighties developments of Whist Hill (no hill, no card games) and Knightstone Rush (a tangle of chicanes and speed bumps) held no draw. She knew no one who lived up here. She felt a rush of relief that Anna was patrolling town.
She felt the trail pull her towards the corner plot of Brock Place. She was letting the stranger idea flummox her. She paused at the corner to settle herself. If she just breathed out… there, it was so much better to let her Strength have full flight than to tamp it down, to be afraid of it. At once she saw the paths and tracks beneath the tarmac and paving. She saw how Woodcastle was a footprint on Havoc itself. With her mind focused she saw where the ragged trail curved up towards a vast hedge. She crossed the road, felt the energy of the high bastion of twigs and branches at once.
The geography felt wrong, skewed in some way. Charlie’s Strength pulled at it. It should be here; Charlie could feel the old footsteps, the paving stones laid and lifted, weeds, moss. It had history. She paused for several moments. There was a twist here, a wrong turning, the phrase popped into her head. She approached the rusted sign bearing the words Red Hat Lane densely twined with ivy. She followed the ragged trail which tried hard to disappear into the swathe of nettles, the trip hazard of brambles. At the wooden gate, paint peeling from it like old skin, her Strength yelled out. The trail she had followed was a wild draggle.
She stood back, telling herself it was to get a better angle. In reality she wanted to run. It was as if someone had torn a hole in the ragged, tattered darkness. She took another step backwards and found her legs entangled. Righting herself she looked down at the slinking and scruffy form of Velvet Joe. His purr rattled her bones as she bent to stroke him.
“Hey.” A whispered word.
Charlie’s heart pole-vaulted, taking most of her skeleton with it and only calmed when Anna touched her shoulder, grounding her.
“Sorry.” Anna apologised, her hand remaining on Charlie’s shoulder for reassurance. “Didn’t mean to make you jump.” Velvet Joe mewled at them both with disdain. “You picked up the trail too?”
Charlie nodded.
Anna eyed the cat. “Led me straight here.” She could just about speak. The one-eyed cat yawned and twisted itself into the cover of the hedge.
“Brave of him.” Charlie grimaced.
“Can you feel it? The crackle?” Anna asked. “Matches with Yarl Hill and Ragger’s Edge. She’s been here too.”
“No… but I can see…” Charlie was struggling with the torn darkness of the trail, desperate to look away, but her Strength urged her closer. Look. Observe where the trail is torn.
“Black crackle. Here.” Anna reached for it.
Charlie saw where the trail was snared by it. “It’s snagged the trail. There.” She stepped closer. She could not see the crackle but felt the trail lurch, a deep dropping-off point, unlike anything she’d ever felt before, and searing with white light.
She turned, saw Anna’s face drain to stone grey, and her Strength rushed in. Her fingers curled tight around Anna’s arm and tugged her from the gate. The two stumbled, Charlie clawing at the ground, dragging her sister. They scrabbled to their feet.
They moved, unthinking, to the soft gold of the old streetlamp on Weaver Lane before either spoke.
“Anna.” Charlie had not let go of her sister; her knuckles whitened and tensed. Anna could not speak. Charlie shook her, massaged her hand in both of hers. She felt cold as stone. “Anna, you okay?”
Anna nodded. “Fine.” Her voice a whisper. “Dark. Like I was falling.”
Charlie felt reassured by this. “Same here. Like dropping off a bridge.” Charlie breathed a little easier. “You said it, Yarl Hill and Kitty; the two sensations tally up. Let’s go.”
They walked to the next streetlight and then the next, unaware of hurrying through the darkness between.
It was unspoken, but they were aware that neither sister let go of the other as they hurried away from Red Hat Lane, and no one asked any questions about the fact that Charlie did not return to Cob Cottage, instead taking up residence in the Emperor Bedroom at Hartfield for the night, falling into a restless sleep where she dreamt of falling from the Knightstone Bridge.
After breakfast, the Way sisters headed to the bridleway to bring Emz up to speed with their finds. On the bridleway itself, Anna and Emz could see the fake trail laid there as clear as day, a thin harsh line of light blurred at the edges. Only Charlie with her Strength could see the true ragged shadow trail.
“You’re standing right on it now,” Charlie said as they trooped their way up past Notch.
Anna looked down and around, took a side step for a better look. The fake light seared a little, more blinding. “Wait.” Anna held herself still. Where was it? That alteration. She inched forward, back. There. What was different at this spot?
“What is it?” Charlie began to walk back towards her.
Anna held up her hand to stop her. “No. Stop. Stop…” Anna scanned the ground. The alteration was just… “Here, Charlie. A footprint.”
They squatted down to take a better look. The boot print was pressed into a patch of mud by a gnarly root. Emz pointed to another print at the path’s edge.
“She skidded.”
Charlie skimmed her gaze over the ground on a quest for other track markings. Anna reached her hand into the footstep. There was a pause. Charlie did not disturb her. After a few moments, Anna looked up.
“You try,” she suggested, leaning back a little, smudging a little of the mud from the print between her finger and thumb. Charlie took a pinch of mud, too.
“What do you see?” Anna asked.
In Charlie’s mind, ragged shadow snatched at autumn light. “Same as the trail. Exactly the same. You getting anything?” She looked at Emz.
“Just that, the trail.”
They looked at Anna. She said nothing for several moments. “Jackdaws.”
They filled her head, flocking and wild. It was exhilarating and terrifying, but, just at the edge, Anna saw where it cloaked the intruder. Charlie looked at her.
“No crackle?” Charlie’s brow furrowed. The sisters shared an anxious look. Anna shook her head; the crackle was entirely absent.
“You’re right. They’ve laid a fake trail,” Emz said. “What did Grandma say? Covered their tracks.” They all felt a pick-me-up from this small remembrance.
“A jackdaw smokescreen.” Anna said. “It’s masked the crackle, at any rate.” It was very beautiful, but she was uncomfortable about the way it pulled at her mind. It was a brew of emotion, a desperate anger, and a need to look past the jackdaws, layered with a certainty of danger or worse. Anna tried to look with the corner of her mind’s eye, like looking through a crack in the door. Her heart pounded, so she looked away.
Charlie wiped her muddy hand on her jeans. “This is how she’s getting in and out,” she decided. “Trespasser.” The word whispered away from them.
Emz gasped. “Did you hear that?”
Charlie shuddered. “Let’s hope she did.” Charlie was stern.
Anna wiped her own hand on a tussock of moss. She shivered.
“You okay?” Charlie asked.
Anna nodded. “Let’s get back.” And she hurried off.
Back at Hartfield, Anna scrubbed her hand to get the mud from her fingertips. It had not mattered how hard, how clean her hand looked, there must have been a trace somewhere, a fine grain of Havoc and footprint trapped in her fingerprint, because she felt wild and confused. Skies roiled with jackdaws, and she was caught up in their wingbeats. It was exhausting hanging in the air, but she knew it was worse to fall, for, behind the feathers and beaks, she glimpsed, flashing here, now there, the spider web wires of the bridge at Knightstone sliced at by white knives of lightning.
18
The Road Home
Seren Lake’s studio shop was tiny, of course, which made it impossible for Aurora Foundling to pop in unnoticed and have a snoop around. Instead, she hovered by the bench on the Market Square side of the Moot Hall so that she had a clear view of the shop but could not be seen. It was wise to suss out the competition. Competition? What was she thinking? And yet as she skulked by the bench and watched Seren, in stocking feet in the window, changing the display, she felt something. Not competition. They were not selling the same wares. Not jealousy? No. Seren’s window display had been a selection of mermaid greens and sea turquoise gowns. They were fairy tale, as were the small array of shoes she had arranged in an antique chest. Aurora coveted it. Where had Seren got such a gorgeous thing? Would she sell it to Aurora?