by Helen Slavin
“I. Pin. You.”
The effect was unsettling. Anna could see where the bone should break, felt the ghost of the pain that might be, what she might lose in the transaction; but something reached out from Nuala and ate her Strength, twisted it back onto Nuala, so that Anna, clutching at Nuala’s wrist, felt the white-haired woman’s bones give.
There was a burning sensation beneath her fingers, not painful to her, and she saw the Red Wrangle as the Flickerbook began to cascade. The images of it flapped like banners, holding themselves in her mind in a way no Flickerbook ever had. Nuala gave a scream of alarm and began to switchback in her effort to break free, but Anna did not let go.
The first banner of memory; the brook, water splashing white, Grandma Hettie’s face, her mouth moving — “I banish you.” At the words, the lightning sheared through that memory into a web of wires on the suspension bridge, wheels spinning through darkness. Anna felt something give in her heart, and the banner folded. Jackdaws mobbed her mind, wings beating wildly to try to mask what came next. Anna could not breathe; her Strength brushed them out of the sky to reveal her grandmother on the steps at Cob Cottage, her face stern, her voice clear: “Don’t do this.” A crow cawed and the jackdaws rushed Anna’s mind once more, feathers, beaks, claws. Overwhelmed, Anna gasped before her Strength opened its own wide black wing and flapped them away.
When she opened her eyes Nuala had gone, and her phone was pinging out a text from Charlie.
Anna hiked up the bridleway breathless with effort. She could see where Charlie lingered by the hedge and where Emz was coming down from Leap Woods and halted suddenly.
“Did she come this wa—” Anna’s question stopped in her throat as she took in the terrible scene.
The man, spread-eagled, was pinned to the ground, with broken pieces of wood snapped from the hedge, thorns prickled out of his skin. Around him on the ground, marks and curves were written in his blood.
“Who is he?” Anna asked.
“A warning,” Charlie ventured.
“Why didn’t we sense this? Why didn’t Havoc cry out, like when Mrs Fyfe attacked Winn?” Anna asked.
“Because this is our Trespasser. This is the thin man I saw.” Emz was certain, stepping down onto the bridleway. “He’s out of Havoc.”
Charlie nodded. “Who did this to him?” she asked. “Nuala?” The thought was like a stone.
“Who else?” Anna said. “She was in the walled garden. Ambushed me as I was coming back to Hartfield.”
Charlie and Emz tensed.
“Ambushed you?”
Anna was struggling. “She was hidden there. Waiting. I think she wanted to break me…” Anna forced herself to look at the man on the ground.
“Like this?” Emz asked, breathless. Anna felt the banners flying from Nuala’s Flickerbook, felt the mobbing jackdaws.
Charlie nodded. “She just took from him. She probably thought she was strong enough to take one of us.” Charlie looked at the corpse of the thin man. “What is going on?”
Anna looked at Charlie, at Emz, at anything that wasn’t the man. She could not speak, robbed for a moment by the terrible possibilities of the images she had seen in Nuala’s Flickerbook.
Charlie was staring at him, her eyes going over the bloodied markings.
Emz was agitated. “Oh. I can see it. Oh…” the image jarred at her emotions. She could see the evening, the rain. “It was like this. It was just like…” The memory unfolded, clear; she recalled the evening. “It was the night…” Her voice choked with emotion. “The night Winn and I were called out to Cordwainer street. There was something that night exactly like… Oh.” She forced herself to look at the man himself, the stringy hair smeared with blood over the thin face, the long dark coat. “This might even be him.” She took a step closer, leaned over his face. She was certain. “Yes. This is him. He was there that night. He’d done this, only he’d used cats… lots of them. In a circle. It was… It was on the… the night Calum and Ethan died.”
It was the first time any of them had ever said the phrase out loud.
It was Anna who broke their several moments of silence. “Her Flickerbook. It was totally different. Flying like pennants, vivid.” She paused. “There was lightning on the Knightstone Bridge. A wheel spinning in darkness.” She halted to let her emotion settle.
“She had something to do with that night?” Emz said.
Anna could only nod. Charlie and Emz shared a pained look.
“Anna?” Emz asked.
“This isn’t a warning. It’s a ritual,” Anna said, her eyes moving over the broken limbs, the blood markings.
“Breaking bones,” Charlie said.
“And Nuala tried this with Winn when she was eight. That’s why Grandma gave Winn her…”
“Token.” Anna filled the little finger of a left-hand sized gap. “Just now, Nuala was lying in wait. Why couldn’t I see her at the walled garden up at Hartfield?”
Charlie and Emz were alarmed by this new thought.
“Blind spot?” Anna suggested. It was a surprise but a useful one.
“Wonder if she was just hiding and chanced it when you came in. Or did she have a definite plan?” Charlie asked.
Anna shook her head. “This is about stealing power. That’s all she’s got, I think, whatever she can beg, borrow, or steal.” Anna looked at her sisters with meaning. They understood.
“Good job she didn’t get anything from you.” Charlie voiced the thought. “Or we’d never take her down.”
There was a moment or more of silence.
Finally Emz broke it. “We’re going to find out what happened on the bridge that night… aren’t we?”
Charlie said nothing. She looked at Anna, whose bleak expression said everything.
“Is that why Grandma Hettie warned ‘Don’t do this’?” Emz asked. “Grandma knew what happened?”
Anna was panicking. Her grandmother’s face and voice replayed in her head. Don’t do this. Don’t do this. Don’t do this.
“Oh, God. This is all wrong.” Anna was floundering, her heart manic with grief and confusion.
“Okay, well, first things first. What do we do with him?” Charlie asked. “Do we call the police? Bury him? What?”
Emz shook her head. “This is Havoc business. He’s not from here; he’s out of Havoc. No one is going to miss him.” Anna heard her own voice. Inside her head, her grandmother’s face and voice continued their litany. Don’t do this. Don’t do this. Don’t do this. “We can’t just leave him here.” Emz’s voice was thin and scared.
Charlie was firm. “We can. Anna’s right. He’s not the priority. No one will find him. We need to find Nuala before she does this to someone that isn’t out of Havoc.”
Charlie walked the bridleway, looking for tracks other than their own. “Where did she go?” She could see the ragged darkness of the Trespasser, the tangle of track where the ritual had been. Nuala’s own ragged darkness tattered and smeared with mud and blood.
“If she killed him first then went to the walled garden, the trail from here isn’t going to help,” Emz said.
Charlie continued prowling back towards her sisters, her face set on the ground, the edge of her vision haunted by the dead man.
“Well, where did she go after that?” Charlie struggled to keep the fear from her voice.
Anna reached for her hand, grabbed Emz’s too. “One way to find out.”
The moment that Charlie took her hand, the Reach soared outwards, unbidden. Freed from thought and constraint, the Reach was vivid and searching. Anna picked up the red thread from the walled garden and reeled it in as Charlie and Emz picked up the thread from other locations; a frayed skein from the allotments, another ragged snaggle from Hartfield’s lawn where the maze had been, which knotted up with a thread that sewed its way from Roz Woodhill’s house. All the threads crossed and wove into a web to reveal that Nuala was held at the centre point. She was not spinning this web; instead it held her. Anna broke the Reach.<
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“What are we doing? We know where she’s going.”
Charlie held the tangle of red thread in her mind, saw the knot that was Nuala ravelling and unravelling as it made its way to Church Lane.
Aurora watched the Cordwainer cats slink their way over the wall. It felt safer to open the door and stand outside with them, so she raided the fridge for scraps of chicken. The cats set up a yawling, discordant symphony, the Devon blue quick to snatch up the biggest morsel. Others seethed around her legs. Only Velvet Joe stayed on the wall, his yowling like an off-key opera singer intent upon his supernatural aria.
She paced a little between the shop floor and the kitchen. She was putting finishing touches to a centrepiece for a Moot Hall dinner tomorrow, and she could not finish it. Her fingers persisted in tweaking and finally, wired, she began another version, just to distract herself.
As she stepped to the bucket of pussy willow whips she’d cut earlier, she noticed the card by the door. It was one of Prickles’ hedgehog postcards. She read the back, the neatly inked black handwriting.
Meet at The Sisters. URGENT.
Aurora looked at it, put it in her pocket, and, as she stepped to the counter to get her keys and phone, she pulled a length of red ribbon from the spools on the wall beside the counter. It was her favourite of all the ribbons, silken and a deep, blood red. Her fingers worked quickly, braiding her hair as she headed for the door.
Charlie could see the red-thread web in its entirety. Emz and Anna saw certain threads, which they reeled in. It had purpose, drawing them this way and that, dogging Nuala’s footsteps all the way to the florist. The Way sisters could not get in, and no amount of knocking brought Aurora.
“The lights are out,” Charlie said, peering through the door.
Anna looked at the towering cage of bramble, stronger, thicker, creaking. “The bramble is here. Doesn’t look like Nuala got in.”
Charlie’s phone rang out.
“Aurora? Where are you?”
In the kitchen at Half-Built House, the lights of Woodcastle winked through the windows.
“Firstly,” Aurora felt wired, adrenalin cocktailing through every blood vessel and breath, “who doesn’t send a text?” She shook her phone. “Someone who does not have your number.” Her smile was too wide and raw. “Secondly…” She flicked the card towards Emz. The Witch Ways had long been taught the importance of a person’s right name. It worked a small magic for them now as Emz turned over the Prickles card.
Meet at The Sisters. URGENT.
— Hannah
Aurora looked wild, though, the sisters noted, her hair was tamed, roped around with red ribbon. In this state, it looked even more dangerous than when it was loose.
“So. She’s expecting me up at The Sisters. That’s where we need to be.” Aurora was burning with nervous energy, stepping to the door. “We need to finish this.” Her voice was scary to hear, slightly too high, too fast. “I’m the bait for this trap.” She was almost at the living room door.
Anna headed her off. “It isn’t that simple.”
“Oh, it is. It really is that simple. We hunt the bitch down at The Sisters.”
“There is no ‘we’,” Charlie corrected. “You’re not going anywhere. Least of all to The Sisters.”
“Are you mad? I’m the lure. Use me. Finish this.” Aurora tossed her braided hair. Stray tendrils snaked into Anna’s face as she stepped forward. “She sent me an invitation.” Aurora flapped the card into the space between them.
“It isn’t simple.” Anna had that sense of standing at the edge of darkness, her mind full of lightning. Rain. Rain. Rain.
Aurora flapped the card once more; it made a sound like snapping fingers. “It’s a duel. You versus her. She’s outnumb—”
“This woman has killed someone.” Anna’s voice was heavy as a stone. It did not faze Aurora.
“Then you can’t just run away from it. We know where she is. You have the perfect bait for a trap.”
“She has a point,” Charlie weighed in.
“We don’t know what we’re doing,” Anna said.
Emz shrugged. “When has that ever stopped us?” she said. “We have to find her. The Sisters is as good a place as any to start.”
Anna hesitated. Her Strength sang out with a terrible knowledge, and yet there needed to be proof.
“We don’t know the extent of what she has done.” Anna sidestepped the horror, kept her gaze to the granite worktop, and was not rewarded. Lightning streaked across her line of sight, caught itself in the glint of Calum’s eye.
“What does that matter? You know she’s killed someone. Isn’t that enough? What would your grandmother have done?” Aurora was forthright. “That’s the only question you have to ask.”
Anna paused for a moment and then lunged forward, snatched at Aurora’s hand.
“What the hell?” Aurora tried to struggle free. They tussled, Anna unrelenting, locking her fingers into Aurora’s, their arms twisted against each other as if they were wrestling. Aurora pulled away. Anna yanked her back.
“Anna? Anna… Stop.” Emz stepped forward to intervene.
Charlie put out a hand to stop her. She looked at Aurora’s troubled face. “Trust her,” Charlie said.
Aurora stopped struggling and turned towards Anna, who put up her other hand, fingers outspread. With a determined look, Aurora interlocked her fingers, and the two formed a circuit. Anna took a deep breath and the Flickerbook cascaded. Jackdaws’ wings beat in her head.
For Aurora, the feeling was of being poured into a place of safety. For Anna, the jackdaws flocked high, higher, and revealed beneath them the four women huddled together, shackled hand and ankle. Cobwebs. Dead squirrels. Cat’s teeth. A blinded eye. Anna’s Strength rolled out before her like Pike Lake, carrying her with its riptide. The first woman stepped forward to face her.
“Selfish beauty,” she whispered as the others began to whisper.
“Ruthless guile.”
“Thoughtless pride.”
“A cruel heart.”
Written in tea leaves. In jackdaw feathers. From the mouth lined with cat’s teeth. Anna let them go.
Aurora was still certain. She shook Anna’s hands, firm and decided. “Please. Whatever she’s done. Use me. Let me help. This is part of me. I’m part of Havoc.”
The Ways looked at her. Charlie nodded first, Emz quick to back her up.
“There’s no choice,” Emz said.
“She will be at The Sisters. She invited me there,” Aurora insisted. Charlie and Emz nodded, but Anna was shaking her head.
“It’s too dangerous,” Anna warned.
“It’s too dangerous not to,” Charlie declared, Emz nodding.
“We need to be a step ahead of her, and we aren’t.” Anna was haunted. Her mind was a magnesium flare. Lightning scorched the suspension wires of the Knightstone Bridge onto her memory. Rain. Rain. Rain.
“‘Don’t do this’, Grandma said. ‘Don’t do this’.” Anna was shaking. She felt if she stopped she would shatter.
“We must stop Nuala,” Charlie said. She had felt sure, but the sight of Anna destroyed all confidence. Her face was grey. “You saw the way she had pegged out the Trespasser. You saw.” Charlie was clinging to the facts.
“I’ve seen other things.” Anna felt filled with jackdaws, a writhing murmuration making her head feel light, her heart heavy. Her lips were dry.
“Anna?” Emz’s voice was steady.
“I think… This is even before Nuala’s Flickerbook. This was…” Anna’s mouth was dry. “On patrol. At Red Hat Lane. What that horrible, crackled power showed me… Before I saw Grandma Hettie, before her warning… it showed me…”Anna’s breath was shallow as her Strength flitted over the images she had seen. “Lightning. The Knightstone Bridge. Rain. Rain. Rain.” It was like an incantation out of Anna’s mouth.
Emz thought her heart would stop. She couldn’t breathe.
“I think… I think…” Anna’s voice
descended to a whisper. Saying it out loud would make it the truth. “Nuala killed Calum and Ethan. I think that is what it showed me.” The words were bitter and dark as first snow. The room chilled; the shadows seemed thinner and deeper. “That’s what is in her Flickerbook. That’s why it flew like banners.”
“We talked about this. It might not be… That wasn’t the only night that lightning…” Charlie tried to avoid the truth.
Anna shook her head, swallowed, trying to stop her throat from sealing with tears. “I think she killed them. I think that’s why Grandma Hettie Red Wrangled her.” Anna gave her sisters a very direct look.
“We can’t be certain.” Charlie tried to be calm. Her eyes locked with Anna’s.
“You’re right. There is only one way to be certain,” Anna said. “At The Sisters.”
37
Crow Heart Stone Heart
Nuala Whitemain trampled through bracken and the cracked and dusty seed heads of hemlock and hogweed. She could see The Sisters looming just ahead, but the journey was haunted. Her senses lit like distress flares under the twin forces of the Red Wrangle and the power she had stolen from Thinne. She couldn’t imagine how much more intense it might have been had she succeeded in breaking the Gamekeeper.
She was torn in two directions, and at the heart of it she felt wild and alive. She felt the intensity of Thinne’s strength in one breath and as she breathed out, so the Red Wrangle took what it could.
It would be enough. They would follow. She had time to charge the stones — they were always hers. She would triumph. She would take Havoc. Everything, every wrong step and setback, had drawn her to this place and this moment.
She staggered into the circle of stones. The energy of them flared. She looked up to the Queen stone, and, as she touched it, an after-image flickered, showing her a twig crown perched atop the face of the woman in town with salt and iron at her fingertips. There was a crackle of the woman’s old intention still caught in the stone. Nuala snatched at it. The Red Wrangle burnt through it like paper.