by Helen Slavin
They said nothing more after that. They sat with their grandmother on the porch until it was dark and, even after Grandma Hettie lit the lantern, they folded themselves deeper into their blankets and sat in silence some more.
5
Momentous
Calum Atwood had not been born in Woodcastle, unlike his lovely wife, but he’d known the town for a long time. His grandfather, Henry, had lived in Woodcastle in the end of the terrace on Scholar’s Cut, and Calum had spent a lot of time with him. He had taught Calum about history and birdwatching and had walked him the length and breadth of the Rade River Valley as a consequence. Even after his grandfather’s death, Calum had spent many of his late teenage summers hiking along the ridgeway at Knightstone that gave commanding views almost as far as the sea. When smaller, he had loved the castle for its adventure and the teashop in town for its cakes and fizzy pop and then, as a teenager, Woodcastle had been his moody retreat from the stresses and strains of home in Castlebury. Even after his grandfather’s death, he cycled there at least once a week, never aware that the love of his life was just a corner away.
He laughed now. They had seemed like stresses and strains when he was morphing from child to young man. They were the stresses and strains that all teenagers went through, tearing off the cocoon of your childhood.
He was thinking about cocoons of childhood now that his own child was well on the way. He thought of the huge responsibility he was taking on, of the fact that a stranger was going to arrive because, of course, they had no idea who was brewing in there. The person who hiccupped in the middle of the night and woke them both up, the mystery that would be revealed to them in a few weeks’ time. Not quite like pulling a rabbit from a hat, he thought, but still, the emotion of anticipation and magic were similar. He was scared and elated in equal measure.
He’d managed to snaffle the Head of Department job, too, and, while he felt a strong sense of personal achievement, the actual task itself was proving a challenge. He wanted all his staff members to share his enthusiasm for teaching and for history. They didn’t.
“I teach history because I can’t be a professional gambler.” Mr Briggs was deadpan in the staff room. “You teach history because you’re a pretentious twat.” A judgement that Calum was happy to accept, because it was passed down by Bastard Mr Briggs.
“He said you were what?” Anna turned from the worktop where she was chopping onions.
“A pretentious twat.” Calum smirked. He wondered, for an instant, if there was a Mrs Briggs. He’d never heard Bastard talk about one. What woman would put up with his smelly… oh god, this was all getting a bit childish in his head.
“How dare he.” Anna was getting worked up. It was a hallmark of this trimester of her pregnancy. The first trimester she’d been ravenously hungry and existed on a craving diet of lemon drizzle cake and bacon. During the second trimester, she had been either hyperactive, up and down ladders wielding paintbrushes and sewing curtains, or asleep. Now she seemed normal, if a little more tired here and there and, obviously, rounded out in the front. But her temper flared like a petroleum refinery.
“I don’t care.” Calum grinned and moved to the cutlery drawer in the dresser. He liked the old beeswaxy smell the drawer wafted out as it opened. “I’d be more worried if he liked me.”
“Professional gambler? What an idiot.” She returned to her task of chopping onions, clearly, from the executioner-style chops she was making, imagining Mr Briggs’ head was under her blade. Oh, or possibly other bits of his anatomy. Calum winced and laughed to himself at the thought of Mr Briggs being castrated by Anna.
“What are you laughing at?” she asked, her voice cold. The blade stilled once more. “You think that it’s funny?”
“No… no, I was just thinking about Briggs and—”
“And the way he undermines your authority? The way he walks all over you? The way he’s letting down the kids because he can’t be arsed to do anything but take his paycheque at the end of the month?”
Calum stopped laughing, and his insides wobbled slightly. He was tired this evening. He’d had a long day bookended by two staff meetings. He should have known better than to mention Briggs.
“No… nothing. Just… look, he doesn’t matter…”
The knife was glinting as Anna pointed it at him.
“You are the Head of Department, and he disrespects you all the time.”
“To be fair, Anna, he disrespects everyone.” Calum’s mind was desperately struggling for a conversational side street to swerve down.
“That teacher needs to be taught a lesson.” Her voice sounded very low and sonorous, suddenly, and the sky outside clouded over, making the little kitchen at Keep Rows very dark. Calum liked their little cottage on account of its long history, but, good grief, it was dark sometimes. A sharp breeze was blowing in ahead of the rain.
“He’s a brat.” Calum attempted to diffuse the anger. “That’s all. A big brat.”
The back door slammed to at a sudden gust of wind, rattling the dresser so that one of the plates wibbled earthwards. Calum, with a grunt, stooped to catch it.
“Save!” He was triumphant, tossing the plate carelessly into the air. As he caught it, it knocked against his wedding ring and cracked in two. Anna stared hard at the broken plate, then up at Calum.
“Hey… accidents will happen.”
Anna continued her task.
* * *
The group of Year Sevens had been unruly from the moment they were lined up to board the coach. It occurred to Calum that some parents didn’t walk their offspring anywhere. Many of the girls in unsuitable footwear had complained of having to walk from the History building to the coach in the car park.
“What?” he’d barked. “It’s a hundred yards.” He’d herded them on past the science labs. They were moaning and mewling, and the boys were already breaking off into fisticuffs and horsing about. He half hoped they’d all get a bit carsick in the coach. At least that might quiet them down.
They arrived at Woodcastle Castle and were instantly hungry, even though the whole journey from school had taken less than fifteen minutes.
“Lunch is at 12:30,” he informed them. “We’re going to look around this part of the castle first, then lunch, then we will move on into the eastern part of the complex.” They all knew, there was no arguing with Mr Atwood.
He understood that there were some children who would never be interested in anything, not history nor traffic regulations nor the meaning of life; but this did not deter him from trying. He had devised an interactive tour of the castle that involved more than the simple hunting down of artefacts and ticking boxes on a worksheet. Mr Atwood tried his damnedest to time travel.
“Dressing up?” David Thomas, a boy whose head was filled with cigarette smoke and not much else, wrinkled his nose. “I’m not fucking dressing up.” Some of the group were still enthusiastic and were dressing up in the garments offered.
“Then you’re going in the dungeon for treason,” Mr Atwood offered.
“Fuck that.”
It took only a few minutes for the group to assemble in the dungeon. David Thomas looked out at his classmates through a small iron grille with a put-out expression edged with doubt. Mrs Bentley, the castle’s warden, had a key and, as it turned out, was not afraid to use it.
“This is abuse,” David Thomas moaned.
“This is interactive education,” Mr Atwood informed him and used him as the centrepiece in a short talk about punishment and politics and threw in some ghosts for good measure.
They emerged a short while later, David Thomas chastised and quiet and hanging at the back of the group.
The usual route through this end of the castle was up via the eastern keep, across the barbican tower and the guard tower, and down via the western tower; however, the group were forced to wait as a lady with white hair made her leisurely way down the wrong spiral stair. Calum was polite but irritated. It was a tightrope of discipline t
hat they walked whenever they brought a group out. Any delay in activity that left the almost-teenagers loafing about could create trouble. He distracted them with techniques for boiling oil and otherwise despatching your enemies.
At lunchtime, he did not notice the woman with bright white hair standing in the window of the tower looking down. The weather had chilled a little, and the group were huddled around their packed lunches. “This place needs a café,” Miss McFarlane suggested as she buried herself in her jacket. Calum was only half listening. Miss McFarlane was pretty much the whiniest teenager in the school despite being thirty-two.
They were walking in single file along the curtain wall, and, because it was quite high, the group were, on the whole, behaving. Only a few girls made a small, squeaking fuss and were chivvied along by braver classmates. It was a hundred yards to the tower, no more. They had crossed the widest expanse in safety, and, at the last moment, that wind had blown up, bitter and battering, and in the blink of an eye David Thomas was falling to earth like a felled soldier.
Calum had almost jumped from the wall himself in an effort to reach the boy. The group were in immediate panic. The squeaky girls, however, were suddenly the ghouls wanting to look down and see David Thomas’ broken body. Miss McFarlane shepherded them quickly to the tower steps, and they all descended as Calum headed the other way and ran down faster. The woman with white hair approaching from the other tower, her feet fleet over the greensward, had reached the boy first and had her hands on his broken body. Calum pulled her away.
“No. Don’t touch him. Step back.”
She flinched, and the look she gave Calum was burning and vicious, but he was oblivious, his focus on his pupil.
Mrs Bentley, hurrying now from the kiosk, had already called the ambulance and, for all his arm looked broken, David Thomas was calm.
“Hurts,” he said, his voice dry-sounding.
“Not surprising.” Calum wanted to reassure him, but his mind was a blank. In the end it was David who reassured him.
“This is how it would feel,” he said. Calum looked puzzled. David continued.
“If you were in a battle, sir. This is how it would feel.”
* * *
David Thomas’ mother did not want to sue the school, for which Calum Atwood was grateful. He suffered through a lecture from the Head that was cut short by a phone call from Anna to say that her waters had broken.
“Go, go, go…” the Head was shooing him out of her office.
This is what it was like to be in a battle. Calum heard David Thomas’ words whispering to him as the labour progressed. This is what it was like to be in a battle. Sweat and noise and blood and amniotic fluid that smelt of straw and animals, somehow, and Calum was overwhelmed with the power emanating from his wife’s body as the baby battled. A portcullis. A drawbridge. The maddest and most ridiculous thoughts ran through his head. He had thought it would be uplifting, this life process, but it was utterly terrifying. Muscles pumping and contracting, bones creaking so that the idea of a pelvis seemed like a weapon to be used. ‘Open the Pelvis’ and let the enemy out... the head crowning… like a king… but an animal… blue and red and slick and waxy. Visceral. Calum’s heart was beating a tattoo, Anna’s hand crushing his. The power of her. The strength.
There was a flurry of activity as the tiny body burst forth. Tiny body. Grey and blue and new. Pinking up as he opened his mouth, he drew in a breath and let out a scream. A war cry. Calum couldn’t breathe, didn’t have enough arms to hold Anna, to hold their new son, to gesticulate in panic and triumph and fear. Tears. Kisses. There would never be enough.
Their son.
Resting now, his miniature face wrinkled in sleep, his pink skin wrapped in a blanket, his miniature fingers held onto Calum’s giant thumb.
Hettie and Vanessa arrived with a bag filled with practical things. Charlie cooed over him, smelling of malt and hops. Emz had knitted a little hat for her new nephew and held his tiny foot in her neat hand. He held court, this little king.
“What are you going to call him?” Hettie asked.
“Ethan,” Anna said.
6
Red Wrangle
Bone magic. Nuala Whitemain had initiated bone magic on the day that Hettie Way’s grandson was born and therefore, Hettie knew, danger readied itself. She was angry, more angry than she had ever been in her entire life, and not simply the nearly eighty physical years, or the two hundred and lost count of Other Years she had lived within the bounds of Havoc Wood. She was angry at herself. She had tried to be just and decent. She had been a fool.
The Gamekeeper job ought, by ancient rite, to have been shared between sisters. In the past, that ancient rite had been wrecked and revoked, and Hettie Way had lived with the after-effects. Now, with Vanessa’s daughters, that ancient rite was going to be restored. Until that day, Hettie Way had to manage alone.
She sat in the spoonback chair, patched over with linen, and she had allowed her thoughts to weave themselves, small and tight, into the warp and weft of the old fabric. It was a trick she had learned long ago from her own grandmother, Granner Way, a method of saving important thoughts in a safe place. The fabric held them, except, tonight, Hettie noticed the places where the fabric was threadbare and frayed, where the thoughts were hardest woven and tensioned too tight. Now she mulled over those patches with extra care, looked out over the lake, and considered her choices.
She was physically drained. Nuala Whitemain had taken the bone magic from the boy at the castle and summoned Trespassers. Hettie was floundering, unsure what to do to finally end this onslaught. Except, she knew she had been fooling herself that she had known what action she must take and that it would be done tonight.
It was almost midnight as Hettie Way stood in the small clearing at Thin Through and waited. She had been scrying in the small puddle at the clearing edge where the bogland, with its moss and myrtle, met the rockier ground of Thin Through proper. Nuala was a bright-white beacon with her hair, and Hettie watched her progress through the wood from the ragged edge at Hazzard’s Pass. The puddle was fresh. It had rained hard that afternoon, so Hettie’s scrying was clear and true. Until now she had let Nuala think she had managed to fog and mist her, working to shadow Hettie’s own scrying. It was lazy and arrogant of Nuala to assume that Hettie had learned nothing from the wood. Hettie reached for the ancient, the hidden Strengths. This scrying now, in the fresh rain, turned its beady eye to the brash magic that Nuala used, keeping it in sight. Prey.
Hettie had fended off every last Intruder, each and every Trespasser that Nuala had summoned or called or entreated week after week after week. She thought of the debt being accrued by her enemy, and how that debt might be called in. Nuala Whitemain was greedy and careless, a danger to everyone, including herself.
Tonight, she would try to halt Nuala once and for all, and her reason for doing this was to save Nuala herself. If Hettie did not stop her then Another would. Whoever she had borrowed from or bargained with would come to collect what was owed.
As Hettie Way set off on her task, her foot stepped into the puddle, breaking up the reflection into a hundred jagged pieces.
* * *
Nuala was striding through Leap Wood, just slightly drunk on the bone magic from the boy at the castle. She smiled to herself. It had taken a long time for an opportunity to arise, but now, with patience, Nuala’s moment was here. The Way girls were grown and woven too strongly into Woodcastle. Hettie Way had let her granddaughters wander too far from Havoc Wood, and Nuala Whitemain had watched with interest.
The darkly jewelled thought in her head was that she was one snapped femur away from overpowering Hettie Way and becoming Mistress of the Wood, and she had had her victim in mind for some time.
The youngest Way sister, Emily, worked at that ridiculous nature reserve and was unaware of the threat posed, so it would be the work of a moment to trap her and break her. The planned magic would be a perfect coming together of everything that she desi
red. The girl, a virgin and a Way; the bone, the longest and strongest and filled with most power; the venue, Leap Wood, the weaker wood to Havoc, less charmed of course, but also the fraying edge of Hettie Way’s jurisdiction and, therefore, a venue that ensured success. Most delicious of all to Nuala, was that the deed would be done in plain sight of Winn Hartley-Hartfield standing powerless in the shadow of the black waxed raincoat of her own protection. Ha. That small pouch and its curled finger contents might yet fall into Nuala’s hands. Let Hettie Way chew on the consequence of that. A harsh wind would blow through Havoc Wood before the week was out.
Nuala had been laughing softly to herself, her step confident, and then the skein of spider web streaked across her face. It had the halting effect of a steel rope, and, startled, she stepped back from it. A glance or two showed her the cinder path at her feet, the dust, the fact that, in her own musings, she had wandered into Havoc Wood. A growl escaped from her, salted with fear and fury. She must leave Havoc. As she turned on her heel, Hettie Way burst from the dark, her fists punching at Nuala’s chest, knocking her to the earth.
“Trespasser, I bind thee.” Nuala was winded, but before she could take in a breath Hettie took a thin skein of red thread from her pocket. It squirmed and roiled around her fingers.
Words dried in Nuala’s throat at the sight of it. She turned, scrabbling at the ground, desperate to get away. Hettie’s boot was on her back, heavy. Nuala felt her own heart seize with fear. Her left hand reached forward for a fallen branch, a stone, any weapon. As she did so, Hettie Way leaned heavily forward, and the red thread began to wind itself around Nuala’s wrist. Red Wrangle. No. She would not give up her power. She would not let Hettie take it.
Nuala gasped for air; her right fist rose to deliver a powerful punch to Hettie Way’s ribcage, her knuckles grazing and grinding against the surface of that damned black raincoat. The Red Wrangle was pulling itself tighter, cutting her skin, her blood seeping into the fibres of it. She blanked the pain, struggled to rise up, and as she did so Hettie’s foot kicked hard against her jaw. Nuala thudded back to the earth, pinned to the ground. Wild with desperation, her fingers scrabbled at the Red Wrangle, her fingertips slicing against the thin cordage. Hettie’s foot slammed down once more, pinning her arm. Nuala could not breathe, felt the shift in the wood, Hettie’s Strength rising through the roots of the clearing, every trunk and branch creaking with it. She had never encountered magic like it, darker than herself, wilder, older, and coursing through Hettie Way, so that it played like sparks of lightning through her grey hair. Her voice low and deep, a dark shadow falling over Nuala.