Midnight's Twins

by Holly Race

  ‘Why didn’t you give Lord Allenby Mum’s note straight away?’

  ‘Because a debt is binding in Annwn. If you don’t try to fulfil a debt, then you lose your ability to enter this world. For Lord Allenby, who governs the thanes of London, it would be disastrous. It is a very powerful thing, an oath, and not to be called upon lightly.’

  ‘I wonder what he did that meant he owed Mum.’

  ‘I cannot tell you that. Your mother had many secrets.’

  She presses Mum’s mirror into my hand. I have one more question, even though it makes me feel childish.

  ‘Is what Lord Allenby said true? Is the Tournament dangerous?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘it can be very dangerous if you do not belong.’

  ‘But you think I do?’

  ‘I do.’

  I don’t find her reassurance particularly comforting. I can’t shake the feeling that perhaps Andraste and Mum are simply believing in me out of love or obligation rather than knowledge. Lord Allenby’s words, that there’s something missing in me, make me uncomfortable. But I cannot voice this fear, not even to Andraste, because she has gone to so much trouble to get me this far.

  She draws me in close for a hug. It’s pretty uncomfortable with her armour digging into my collarbone, but I try not to wince.

  ‘If you become a knight, you will save us, won’t you?’ she whispers, so quietly I almost don’t hear her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Be courageous, Fern King, like your mother.’

  She kisses me roughly on the forehead. The blue light that surrounds her shimmers, and for an instant I have a sense of déjà vu. A memory of other forehead kisses. A deep, melodic voice. Sweet dreams, munchkins. Then it’s gone.

  ‘What do you mean, save you?’ But she has opened the mirror. The light inside it pools out around me. Suddenly the platform I’m on is glowing too. Andraste walks heavily away from the castle. As the light tries to close my eyes, I see her falter and clasp her side. I try to fight the pull towards consciousness, to help her, but it’s no good.

  The last thing I see before I wake up is the dome of the castle standing proud against a high sun. And ranged around its edge are hundreds and hundreds of angels.

  9

  Sometimes my head gets stuck inside a nightmare, and even after I’ve woken up it takes ages to remind myself it wasn’t real. This morning I have to do the opposite. Whenever I try to absorb that I’ve just been in a different reality, something in my brain shuts down. I have to consider it from a distance, like a physics theory where the concept’s so intangible that I don’t feel its weight. If I think of it like that, I’m safe. I touch my cheek. The burn scar is there again, the crumpled skin thick and immobile.

  The beginnings of dawn are starting to reach through the window, but I don’t move from the spot on the floor where I woke. My whole body feels different, like wearing an old pair of jeans after they’ve been washed.

  ‘Sleep well, Ferny?’ Dad asks when I go downstairs. He’s standing over the row of orchids we keep on the windowsill, using a dropper to feed them just the right amount of water.

  ‘In a way.’

  That makes Ollie look up from the TV. Satisfyingly, he’s still got red marks on his hands from where I dug my nails in last night. I can’t wait to see his face when I turn up at Tintagel this evening.

  It’s my turn to make lunch so I busy myself in the kitchen. The secret, that I’ve got a chance to be in the knights, is delicious. Even more delicious is that Mum wanted me to follow in her footsteps and went to great lengths to give me that chance.

  ‘Mmm, that smells good, Ferny. Curry’s one of Clemmie’s favourites.’ Dad nabs a spoonful of sauce out of the pot. A few days ago I might not have been feeling so generous, but actually I planned to make curry for Clemmie as a sort of unspoken thanks for the other day, after Archimago’s messages. To be honest, I’d probably be nicer to her in general if she wasn’t so beige. But today, when Clemmie arrives in a flurry of lavender cashmere, I embrace her like the gracious host that I am. When she remarks that the orchids are doing well, I don’t remind her that we only keep them because they were Mum’s favourite flower. When she calls me ‘Ferny’ over lunch I don’t snap that Dad has exclusive rights over that nickname.

  ‘Had any more dreams about your guardian angel lately?’ she asks me, sharing a knowing smile with Ollie.

  ‘Last night, actually,’ I say, unfazed for once by her attempts to pretend she’s part of the family. ‘She took me to St Paul’s Cathedral, of all places.’

  ‘How strange!’

  Ollie tries to titter along but I can see I’ve thrown him.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ I laugh, getting carried away. ‘I mean, what’s she going to do with me next? Take me to a tournament?’

  Clemmie and Dad are stumped but smile anyway, obviously wondering whether I’ve finally cracked. Ollie’s smirk, however, is frozen. He knows for sure now. Little victories.

  After lunch Clemmie corners me. ‘Fern, the other day …’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I tell her, ‘it was just a prank.’

  ‘You found out who did it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I lie. ‘They fessed up. I’m just going to drop it.’

  Clemmie frowns. ‘I do think –’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say firmly. ‘Thanks, though.’

  I slip upstairs and lock my bedroom door so Clemmie can’t follow me. The sound of Ollie washing dishes and chatting to Dad rumbles up through the carpet. A few moments later Clemmie’s higher tone joins in and I sigh in relief. I can’t be having her trying to investigate Archimago. Not now I have a chance to investigate them myself, from Annwn. I look round my room and clutter looks back. Something precious. That’s what Lord Allenby had said. My pride, I think, moving piles of paper from one part of the floor to another.

  I empty my drawers. There, at the bottom of one, is an old jewellery box. Inside are a few tangled chains, a rosary from a distant uncle, and there – a silver pendant. It twists my heart.

  When I was eight I spotted it in the window of a pawnbroker’s shop and was captivated immediately. Filigree silver woven into a crescent moon surrounded by five diamond stars. It was battered even then, one setting missing its gem. The delicacy of the workmanship was exquisite. I imagined a Victorian jeweller spending days manipulating diamonds and moulding silver with blistered fingers, only for his work to be passed through owners until it arrived at the pawn shop in this sorry state. Most people wouldn’t have blinked at the price tag, but it was still out of reach of my pocket money. He never said anything, but I knew instinctively that asking Dad for more was out of the question.

  I looked at the pendant through the shop window every day for a fortnight. Apart from the constant desire to look normal, I’d never wanted anything as much as I wanted that necklace. Once I even took the money out of Dad’s wallet, but I got an attack of conscience and returned it before he realised.

  Then one day Ollie knocked on my bedroom door and thrust a velvet pouch into my hands. Inside it, the necklace.

  ‘It’s an early birthday present, okay?’ he told me as I stared at it. Close up, I could see how the silver threads in the moon were twisted together like rope.

  ‘How did you get it?’

  ‘How do you think, crazy? I bought it.’

  ‘But it’s too expensive.’ I had a vision of the police knocking at the door and dragging Ollie away, Dad crying, me crying, and Ollie in prison forever and ever. ‘Did you steal it?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘I’m not stupid.’

  ‘Don’t say stupid things then. I’m good at saving. Not like you, spendypants.’

  I wore that necklace every single day, even after Ollie stopped liking me. Right up to the day of the fire. I was wearing it when they tied me to the tree. If you look closely just below my clavicle, you can see the outline of the pendant where the burning metal seared my chest. The necklace bears the marks of the fire too. The wires ho
lding the stars are so brittle that one of them has broken. Only three diamonds remain. The crescent moon is grey and mottled. I suppose I should have thrown it away, but it is precious to me, even now. Once I loved it for its battered beauty. Now it’s irrevocably deformed, like me. Both of us were destroyed by my brother.

  As darkness falls, bringing bedtime closer, I push my doubts away: the fact that I might not get into the knights; Lord Allenby’s warnings; the danger of the Tournament. I can’t let Andraste down. I can’t let Mum down. I can’t let myself down.

  ‘You just open the mirror,’ the woman in the green tunic had said when she returned it, ‘and it will bring you to Tintagel. Just keep it safe and be sure you’re alone when you open it.’

  When I do open the mirror, it takes a moment for the portal to come to life. Then, like a hob switched on, the mirror grows warm to hot to burning. The light pulls me inside and throws me into the black waters that breach Ithr – the real world – and Annwn.

  When I reach up out of the waters I am not standing next to Tower Hill, but on the round platform in Tintagel’s gardens that had sent me home last night.

  ‘Hi,’ someone chirps. ‘I don’t think we’ve met, have we? I’m pretty sure I’d remember your face. Red eyes. Wow. Wish I could imagine myself something cool like that, but I suppose we’ll learn that later.’

  The prattling comes from a boy about my age, with nut-brown skin and a haircut that might have been cool twenty years ago. I know his type immediately. False confidence. Talks too much. Trying and failing with his appearance. He’s me if I’d actually cared about being popular.

  ‘I’m Ramesh,’ he says, eagerly holding out a hand.

  ‘Um. Fern,’ I say, but I put my hands in my pockets. I don’t do physical contact unless I can help it.

  Before he can say anything else, I turn back to the platform. Motes of inspyre spark. Like corn in a pan, they reach a limit then burst. But instead of popcorn there’s a person standing where the dust was. Another spark; another person appears. Soon the platform is full. Some people are in regular clothing like me, some are in the thanes’ uniform of a coloured tunic over leggings and boots.

  ‘Shall we head on over?’ Ramesh says. ‘We might be unfashionably early, but it shows willing, doesn’t it? Never know if there’s going to be a queue.’

  He sets off without waiting for a reply. Great. I’m stuck with a talker.

  ‘What do you make of all this, then?’ Ramesh babbles over his shoulder. ‘I legit thought I was going insane when that light came. I wonder if they know when we’re on our own or if some people are taken when they’re having a sleepover or out at the cinema.’

  I know that I should probably reply but I worry that would only encourage him.

  ‘The water when you come into this place is really horrible, isn’t it? I freaked …’

  ‘Are you as scared as I am?’ a soft voice says behind me, and I turn to see a plump, rabbit-eyed girl trailing behind Ramesh and me.

  ‘God, yeah.’ Ramesh grins, seemingly unbothered by the interruption to his monologue. ‘Didn’t sleep a wink last night. I had these really weird dreams.’

  They laugh the way strangers do when they want to be friends.

  ‘Fern; Rachel.’ Ramesh nods between the girl and me. More come up behind her, offering hands to shake and names to remember, and I am forced to reciprocate. Oh no. This wasn’t what I’d bargained for at all. It was supposed to be solitary. I’d be on my own, roaming this world like I roam London after school.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ At last, someone I know how to deal with. Ollie is standing in the midst of the group. There was a time when I envied the way he could arrive and a whole party would gravitate towards him.

  ‘Special invitation.’ I give him my best whattaya-going-to-do-about-it-huh smile.

  ‘How do you know each other?’ rabbity Rachel asks.

  ‘We’re twins,’ I say, knowing that it will pain Ollie enormously to admit to being related to me. ‘He got all the looks, I got all the morals.’

  Ollie’s expression sharpens.

  ‘Wow,’ I hear Ramesh whisper to someone. ‘If I’d wanted to watch messed-up family arguments I’d have told my parents where I hid their whisky.’

  ‘Fern likes to make out she’s special,’ Ollie tells his harem. ‘Everything’s about her, you know the type.’

  He breezes past me, his followers trotting along in his wake. I offer a sarcastic smile as he passes. I should be used to his barbs by now. As the rest of the group traipses towards the castle doors, casting assessing looks my way, I make a vow. I will become a knight, find out what happened to Mum, and never, under any circumstances, even think about trying to make friends with any of these people.

  10

  It’s going to take me some time to get my head around the fact that St Paul’s has become a medieval castle. As we are shepherded into the area beneath the dome, I try to peer through open doorways, or over the shoulders of a group of thanes who are huddled around a circular table. The marble floor beneath me is made of slabs of silver and purple flecked with gold – shades of marble I’ve never seen in Ithr. They are arranged in a perfect circle that mirrors the dome above us. I wish I was alone so I could get a good look at the full pattern instead of craning around other people’s legs.

  We are corralled into a semblance of order by people in green tunics. ‘It’s imperative you stay inside this circle …’ one of them begins.

  I try to stay on the edges of the crowd, but Ramesh has attached himself to me despite Ollie’s jibes, and where Ramesh goes, it seems that Rachel goes too.

  ‘So how come you weren’t at the initiation?’ Ramesh whispers. ‘Did you get a free pass or something?’

  ‘Yeah, Fern, how come you weren’t there?’ Ollie chimes in from a distance.

  ‘You should have come,’ Ramesh carries on, oblivious to the sudden tension. ‘It was good fun. It’s a great group of people here.’

  I shrug. I’m not going to tell any of them that I’m only here on sufferance.

  ‘Do you know which lore you want yet?’ Ramesh says. ‘I mean, obviously the knights are the coolest, but Rachel wants to be a harker.’ He mock-grimaces.

  ‘The harkers look amazing,’ Rachel says. ‘Did you see the view from the balcony? And the Round Table is so beautiful.’

  Lore, harkers, Round Table? I’m even more out of my depth than I’d thought.

  ‘I’d hate to be a reeve, like these guys.’ Ramesh indicates the people in green tunics, who are clearly getting exasperated by our lack of concentration.

  ‘The administrators of Annwn.’ A boy behind Ramesh has been listening in and now rolls his eyes in disdain. ‘Sounds like the most boring job ever.’

  Ramesh nods. ‘But wouldn’t it just be the worst to go through the Tournament and find out you can’t be a thane at all? I don’t think I’d be able to sleep ever again.’

  I withdraw at that. They are touching upon my greatest fear but I can tell from their excitement that they don’t really believe it will happen to them. It could very well happen to me, though.

  Ramesh’s conversation is interrupted by a noise like a sonic boom. The tiles encircling us erupt into a wall of light. Rachel isn’t the only one who screams. Above our heads is a cylinder of blue light. At its top, there’s a landscape. A ying and yang of grass and sky.

  ‘Don’t be frightened,’ one of the reeves calls. ‘You all came here through a portal. Think of this as the same thing – just on a bigger scale.’

  ‘This way, squires,’ I hear Lord Allenby growl from amidst the crush. A moment later his silhouette is moving along the tunnel. It looks as though he’s walking on a wall. My brain and eyes are at war with each other, trying to resolve the impossible. The spot between my eyebrows pulses with confusion.

  ‘How do we do that?’ Ramesh says.

  I move closer to the wall of light. It’s made up of thousands of fibres, stretched like harp strings that bend and spring
back when pushed. I’m not the only one who’s trying to figure out how it works, as if anything in this world makes logical sense. Ollie pushes through the crowd to study the wall himself, and I just know that he’s planning on being the first person to follow Lord Allenby.

  That’s enough motivation for any self-respecting twin sister. I place both hands on the wall, as far up as I can reach. Think of it like bouldering, I tell myself, like the kids’ ones in the Olympic Park. As long as the light strings let me dig my fingers in, it’s not so different. When I’m satisfied that I’ve got a good grip, I lift my feet off the ground and balance them against the wall.

  The world lurches.

  I’m no longer climbing. I’m on my hands and knees, feeling like I’m going to projectile vomit, on a wall that is no longer a wall but a floor. Shakily, I get to my feet, expecting to fall off at any moment. By every law of physics I can remember – and admittedly that’s not many – none of this should be possible. But here I am, standing upright on a soft carpet of light, with the rest of the crowd who should be below me to one side instead. It’s them who are on a wall, not me. Up ahead I can just make out Lord Allenby’s shadow, watching me.

  Ramesh and Rachel clap, and before long the whole group is cheering.

  ‘Give us a hand then,’ someone says. A stranger is voluntarily asking for my help. This night keeps getting weirder. I pull him up – or over, I can’t decide which. He lands unsteadily, but makes the transition from horizontal to vertical – or vertical to horizontal – more gracefully than I did.

  To avoid having to interact further, I walk ahead. I like to think I look confident, but the light is like sand, lapping over my feet if I try to move too quickly. Eventually I stumble out of the tunnel into sunlight. Stubby grass spreads out under a sky streaked with the detritus of clouds. A low bank of earth bends gently around me.

  ‘Wowzers.’ Ramesh whistles, emerging behind me, and even as I wonder who on earth says that any more, I turn to see what he’s looking at.

  The bank, I see now, is circular. In the centre, slabs of marble erupt from the grass. They are joined at the top by smaller slabs, creating a series of archways that face into each other like military commanders at a secret meeting. The sharpness of the cut stone is rendered even more forbidding beneath the relentless sunlight.