Curse of the Celts

by Clara O'Connor

  Matthias ignored the question.

  “Once we’re back in our lands, I’m the only thing that’s going to keep us alive. It’s a long way to York.”

  “Touché.” Matthias slashed Devyn with his snake-in-the-grass smile. He looked over at his son and back at Devyn; whatever he saw there clearly decided him. “You will see him to York. Promise me.”

  Devyn nodded. “Is that where your ally is?”

  What ally? Did Devyn suspect a traitor? Did he suspect that someone had betrayed my mother, that someone had helped them steal me away? Was this why Calchas’s earlier bombshell had sent him reeling?

  Matthias shook his head, “No, I…”

  “Look.” Marcus grabbed his father by the shoulder, pointing towards not one but three boats that were now approaching us at speed. “We are caught.”

  “Not yet,” Matthias pulled the throttle all the way back. The hovercraft shot forward, flying across the water. “If any of you have any tricks you can use, now would be the time.”

  I focused, willing the night to answer my call. I felt nothing in response.

  “I still can’t; it’s not there,” I yelled, raising my voice to be heard across the wind ripping my words away into the night. “At the arena, they injected us.”

  “We’ll just have to hope our technology holds out then,” Marcus shouted back.

  We sped through the night. Richmond whipped by, and we were out, well past the furthest point I had ever been from the city. The pursuing boats chased us across the water, the sky behind them bright with the orange light of Londinium while we raced forwards into the black wall of the west. The only light was the tunnel made by the headlight at the front of the hovercraft.

  Matthias glanced back over his shoulder. “We aren’t going to lose them, and sooner or later the tech will fail. While we still have a lead, I’ll pull in to one of the islands in the river. You three jump out and hide, and I’ll lure them further on. It will give you a chance.”

  Devyn nodded his agreement even as Marcus started to disagree. “No, Father. What about you?”

  Matthias shrugged. “There was always a chance I would get caught. They may not actually be hunting you down. Maybe we just attracted the attention of a patrol. I may yet be able to talk myself out of it; I’m still a member of the council. Now, get ready. Grab the bags from the locker; you’ll need them on the road.”

  Marcus protested, but his father just looked at him. “I said, go.”

  We pulled on the packs and prepared to jump.

  “There.” We had passed several small islands in the middle of the river, and a series of bends meant that we were also out of the line of sight of the pursuing boats. “Ready?”

  He slowed the hovercraft and pulled in to the tree-covered island. We jumped into the dark. The water was freezing and I couldn’t catch my breath. I felt a hand pulling me upwards and we all pushed through the tall reeds and pulled ourselves up onto the bank as the chasing boats flew by.

  Matthias had lost his lead when he dropped us off; he couldn’t be that much further ahead of them.

  The noise reached us first. We turned in the direction of the boom as an explosion lit the night sky.

  “No!” Marcus screamed, pulling his bag off, preparing to drop into the water and go to his father.

  Devyn grabbed him. “What are you doing, you fool? You’ll get us all killed.”

  Marcus pushed him away, every instinct – familial and medical – screaming at him to rush to the site of the fire. “That’s my father. I have to help him.”

  “Marcus, Marcus.” I stood in front of him, trying to get his attention as Devyn continued to hold him back. I grabbed his face so he would look down at me. “He’s gone. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. There is no way he could have survived. He’s gone.”

  Marcus stilled, his stricken face ghostly in the night.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Nobody could have lived through that.”

  Marcus slumped to the floor, all fight gone out of him.

  Chapter Five

  Marcus sat unmoving in his wet clothes, blankly staring at the night sky still lit up by after-effects of the explosion that had most likely killed his father.

  “We need to move,” Devyn urged. “We need to get through the borderlands as quickly as possible.”

  I looked over at Marcus. We had prevented him from going to his father, the father who showed him so little love in his lifetime but who ultimately gave his life to save his only son. Would the father whom I had always been so sure adored me have done the same? I had grown up showered with whatever my heart desired, but when it mattered, when everything I believed turned out to be a lie and I was sentenced to death, my parents had been noticeably absent. Meanwhile, the conniving power-hungry Matthias had risked and lost all to save Marcus. I couldn’t even begin to imagine Marcus’s pain at the loss, made so much worse by the twisted relationship he had with his father.

  The sentinels’ boats passed by us, making no attempt to scan the banks – a sure sign that they presumed all passengers had died in the explosion. One of the boats was towing the other, most likely because the power had failed this close to the border ley line. Once they had gone, the darkness once again was lit only by the fire further upstream.

  Marcus continued to stare with unseeing eyes across the water. We had been here for hours, stuck in the immobility of his grief.

  “We have to leave,” Devyn whispered to me.

  I nodded. I knew we needed to be on our way – the further away from the city we were the better. I had no desire to return there anytime soon. Honestly, it was past time that one of these attempts to escape just stuck.

  I went over to Marcus and put my hand on his arm.

  “Marcus…” No response. I repeated his name in the hope of getting some flicker of answer. Nothing. I turned back to Devyn. “Maybe we could give him another moment or two.”

  “We can’t. It will be morning soon. We need to go north but the new day is Samhain – not a good time to be crossing the borderlands. Once the sun rises, it won’t be safe to be here.” Devyn shook his head, correcting himself. “While the sun is up, the borderlands will be perilous, but to be caught in them after dark will be suicidal.”

  I frowned. Admittedly, I knew very little about the world outside the walls, but I wasn’t aware that the borderlands were dangerous to travellers. Not that there was much traffic; it’s not like we had a trade agreement with the Britons. As far as I knew, the only people who ever crossed the borderlands were the Britons who came to the city every four years to renew the treaty that merely kept the peace. But surely meeting Britons would be a good thing.

  “Are there sentinel patrols?” I asked. I was reminded of the one I had seen in my vision, the one that had cut down my mother when I was a baby.

  “Not patrols; the borderlands are wide, and both sides monitor live movement,” Devyn explained further at my frown. “If any sizeable force were to try to cross the borderlands, it would trigger magical alarms. Conversely, if a Briton force were to approach the city, there is no doubt it would set off a warning inside the walls. So it was during wartime, and so it is in peacetime too.”

  “How did you get into the city, then?” How did a sixteen-year-old intent on finding a lost child cross mile after mile of land rigged with alarms? No matter how determined or canny he was.

  “On my own, I could likely have made it through the borderlands undetected, but it was easier to slip in on a boat that was coming from Calais,” he explained.

  “You’ve been to Gallia?” I was envious. This was the furthest I had ever been from Londinium – that I remembered anyway. But now, I was finally going home. An empty space within me fizzed in anticipation.

  “Never mind Gallia, or how I got to Londinium.” He halted me, his lips thin. “Worry about how we’re going to get away from Londinium. The alarms and warnings will be the least of our concerns on Samhain.”

  “What does
Samhain have to do with it?” I knew little more than that Samhain was one of the major festivals in the Briton calendar, a harvest festival held before the winter.

  Devyn huffed, unimpressed with the know-nothing citizen. “Samhain is the day when the veil between this world and the next is at its thinnest, when those on the other side walk amongst us, and nowhere is more dangerous than the land where generations have drenched the ground with their blood.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I smirked. “Ghosts, Devyn? Really?”

  He half laughed in reply. “Hocus-pocus, Cass.”

  Was it really only this spring that I had scoffed at the existence of magic? It seemed a lifetime ago.

  He waggled his fingers in the air before walking behind me. “And things that go boo!” he whispered in my ear.

  I looked at Marcus, hoping Devyn’s antics weren’t registering. “Shh, his father just died.”

  “And we will die too if we don’t get a move on.”

  “Let’s go then,” Marcus said out of the darkness.

  He stood up and went to his bag to change, as Devyn and I had earlier when we realised that we were going to be here for a while.

  “Wait,” Devyn stalled him. “There’s no point. Cass and I will be taking these dry clothes off. We need to swim back to the other side of the river.”

  “Cassandra,” Marcus grumbled, his emphasis on the all too often missing syllables. He hadn’t said anything before about Devyn’s shortening my name, but, perhaps because his mind was elsewhere, his irritation at the dropped half of my name came out.

  We stripped down and pulled the bags onto our backs, then made our way through the tall reeds which glowed golden in the red dawn, stepping through them into the dark water of the Tamesis.

  “Be careful, the current will be strong. Don’t fight it; let it carry you but still make your way across,” Devyn advised.

  I squirmed my way into the freezing cold water. I’d had other things on my mind the first time we took a dip; this time there was no ignoring the intolerable temperature. With the boys hanging back so that I was in front of them, I had no choice but to brace myself against it and plough forward, knee-deep, hip-deep—the water seeping up the T-shirt I had left on for modesty’s sake—shoulder-deep, and then the muddy, rocky riverbed was no longer reachable. I took one stroke and then another, my direction not as straight ahead as I had hoped; for each forward stroke, I was pulled several feet downstream by the current. Devyn’s words repeated over and over in my mind: don’t fight it, keep trying to move forward. The other side was getting closer, wasn’t it?

  By the time we pulled ourselves up the muddy bank on the far side, we had been swept hundreds of metres downstream. I hopped from foot to foot, trying to get warm as Devyn opened my bag; my attempts to release the zip with my frozen fingers had been feeble. He took a shirt out and roughly rubbed my body dry with it. I winced at the sensation but thanked him for his efforts. My skin felt raw, the cloth like sandpaper on my chilled body, but at least I could pull on some dry clothes.

  Marcus started walking upriver along the bank before Devyn even pulled his boots back on. We quickly caught up with him.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Devyn informed him.

  Marcus didn’t reply, just kept walking. The sky was now a beautiful aqua-blue and the sun had come up over the horizon behind us. It took longer than I would have expected to get to the place where Matthias’s boat had been hit. It was stuck in the bank on the other side of the river, a burning husk. There was no way anyone had lived through that. If Matthias had been flung overboard, given the strength of the current, it seemed likely that he would have floated by us. Could we have missed him in the dark? It was a possibility.

  Marcus pulled off the dry shirt he had donned only thirty minutes earlier.

  “What are you doing?” Devyn asked sharply.

  Marcus knelt to untie his boots. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “It looks like you’re being left behind. Come on, Cass.” Devyn took my hand and started to move on. “Good luck.”

  “What? We’re not leaving without him.” I pulled my hand free.

  “We’re not waiting here while that fool crosses the river to confirm what he already knows.” Devyn whirled round to shout at Marcus. “He’s dead. Going over there… What’s the point? If he isn’t there, you have achieved nothing. If he is there, he’s dead. And you’ll have achieved nothing, except you will have killed us too.”

  Marcus glared at him with deadened eyes.

  “The sentinels think we all died. Who do you think is coming for us now? Your ghosties?”

  Devyn shook his head. “You’re not listening. You’re not in your comfortable lives behind the walls anymore. People all over the land will stay in their homes this day; they will carve out lanterns and light them in their window, so the dark doesn’t cross their threshold. They will do that in the valleys, in the mountains, in the Lakelands. No one, but no one, enters the borderlands on Samhain. If we don’t get moving, we will be here when the sun sets, and whatever chance we might have during the day, we have none at all at night. So you can do what you want, Dr Courtenay, but I am getting Cass out of here.”

  With that, he grabbed my hand in a painful grip and started marching away from the river across the field. Marcus stood watching us leave before he turned back to the shell of his father’s boat and resumed taking off his boots in preparation for his next swim.

  I gasped as pain shot through my arm. Devyn, unheeding, marched on, pulling me with him. My entire arm was starting to tingle before another shooting pain went through me. I bit my lip to keep from crying out, but Devyn must have felt it through our connection as he came to a stop.

  “What is that?” In his single-mindedness, he had forgotten that Marcus and I were tied together.

  I shook my head, unable to speak as the pain rolled through me and nausea followed in a wave after it. I crumpled onto the ground, my knees genuinely too weak to hold me up.

  “Marcus!” Devyn roared as I closed my eyes, sinking into his arms. “Marcus. Please.”

  The pain started to ease until, looking up, I saw that Marcus had joined us.

  “Are you okay, Cassandra?” he asked, not unsympathetically. “The handfast distance limit must have kicked in.”

  “Already? That doesn’t make any sense,” I said, recalling the previous time this had happened. “I was miles from you before it kicked in the last time. Here, you were still within shouting distance. In the city we lived further apart than this and nothing ever happened.”

  Marcus thought it over before offering, “My father mentioned that the burn in the blood gets stronger as the handfast goes on; most couples are bound for a shorter period than we have been. Maybe the distance gets shorter too.”

  “Or maybe it’s the borderlands,” Devyn said drily. “You’ve got to listen to me. This land is twisted; the war magic, the blood spilt… It’s different here at the best of times. And at this time of year, all bets are off. I am begging you. We have got to get out of here before nightfall.”

  Marcus surveyed him, weighing up his words. He looked back at the still smoking husk of the boat on the other side of the river before finally nodding his agreement.

  “There’s nothing you could have done,” I said, contemplating my words carefully before attempting to offer what little comfort I could find in the awful situation. I went over and wrapped my arms around him. He stiffened before easing into the embrace and taking what was offered.

  “Wait here.” Devyn jogged back to pick up Marcus’s backpack to save Marcus and me having to make the trip.

  With one last look back at the burning boat on the other side of the Tamesis, Marcus finally pulled on his bag and we set off. We headed away from the city and the river, which I made out to be roughly northwest. Devyn set a cracking pace as we crossed fields of long green grass, so unlike the land tended by the Shadowers further east, where the fields were full of crops or li
vestock, stone walls marking out one farm from another. Here, there were no manmade boundaries, no signs of humans, except that I started to realise that certain dips and craters around which we wove were unlikely to be natural, but instead were signs of the fierce battles that had raged over these contested lands for centuries. Which side had created such holes in the ground? Were they the result of gunpowder and the limited technology that worked reliably this near the infamously destabilising May ley line, or were they the result of magical forces? I couldn’t begin to discern.

  Initially, Devyn had held my hand as we went along, picking out a path that only he could see, but as the hours passed and the sun rose in the sky, my legs began to tire and I started to lag.

  “We need to take a break,” Marcus finally announced. Devyn grumbled that we could walk and eat but eventually agreed to a five-minute break after looking at the heavily wooded hills ahead of us.

  We perched on some rocks and rummaged through the well-provisioned bags Matthias had provided. As well as the clothes and waterproof boots of which we had already taken advantage, there were protein packs, hydration pills, pocket knives, rope, and other bits and pieces that I couldn’t identify but which looked practical and survivor-y. At the bottom of each bag lay a primitive gun. Nothing as advanced as the laser-sighted weapons that the sentinels carried in the city – they would be unreliable out here – and Caesar only knew where he had managed to find such things. Matthias had done well by us. I marvelled again at the fact that he had done this for us, that a singularly ambitious and selfish man had, in the end, done right by his son. He saved us when all hope seemed lost. We were somehow alive and free.

  I got up and, with a discreet smile, moved away to use nature’s basic facilities. It might lack the faucet and lavatory of our cell, but I was okay with that. I was returning when Marcus let out a startled shout. I ran back, but he was standing looking at the ground, no sign of any sentinels approaching. Devyn too had stepped away and was returning at a sprint.