by Holly Race
Tentatively, I place a hand on each side of Jenny’s head and stare down into those stupid, malevolent eyes. Inspyre vibrates through my fingers. A taste seeps into my mouth – the tang of out-of-date milk and unbrushed teeth. This is what Jenny’s imagination tastes like. It’s oozing up into me through my hands. No, thank you, that can go right back where it came from. Gathering my willpower, focusing it on Jenny’s mind, I push against it, squeezing Jenny’s sour thoughts back into her and following them with my own. The crackle runs from my head, down my arms, pools in my fingers, but it can’t make that final leap. Jenny’s brain is fighting me, unable to contemplate anything beyond her narrow view of the world. I push again, letting the pain in this time. I think about the flame that I’ve created, resting it in my imagination as I concentrate on working my way into Jenny’s mind. There’s a final barrier, then her fight falls away.
The flame drops. It pools out over Jenny’s chest, like mercury. At first she doesn’t react. Then her eyes flicker, as though she’s waking up. She doesn’t try to escape the fire. She just opens her mouth and screams. I reel back, away to the other side of the room. The fire laps up her neck and into her hair. It’s the scream that frightens me, though. Expressionless, no fear in it, just pure pain. I’ve never heard anything like it.
The wrongness of what I’ve done crashes down on me. This isn’t justice or divine retribution. I’m not teaching Jenny a lesson, I’m just torturing her.
‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’
I’m across the room again, my hands either side of her head once more. My panic makes it difficult to order my thoughts enough to pull the nightmare from her. I have to calm my mind, all the while listening to that unwavering scream of pain. Finally, I’m able to block the noise for long enough to extract the nightmare from her, like sucking poison from a sting. The flame dies gradually, then it burns out. The screaming stops immediately.
I drop off the bed and stumble away from Jenny, from the scene of my wrongdoing. In the corner of my eye I see something moving at the dormer window. I start up, adrenalin surging through me once more. Is it a nightmare? A dreamer? Someone is staring in at us, at me. They are looking straight at me and it is neither nightmare nor dreamer. It is far worse – it’s a knight.
37
The shock on Ramesh’s face tells me that he’s seen everything. In an instant I’ve disappeared the glass and shot out of the window to catch him. Grabbing him by the ankle, I pull him to the ground. We land in a soggy flowerbed. ‘I can –’ I begin to say, but I can’t. How can I begin to explain what I’ve just done?
‘You were burning …’ Ramesh, too, can’t get the words out.
He pulls away and starts running back towards Tintagel.
‘Wait!’ I shout, but he doesn’t stop. He’s always been a better runner than me. I’ll never catch up. I reach for the ache in the back of my head and throw it out towards him. Ramesh freezes mid-stride.
‘Please just let me explain.’
‘Let me go,’ he says through gritted teeth.
I release him and Ramesh stumbles as he regains control of his limbs. He doesn’t meet my eyes, and I realise with a strangely pleasant rush that he’s frightened of me. We both know now that I could do anything to him to keep him from telling on me. I could make him forget. I could hurt him until he agreed. I could make him kill himself.
I’m the one to step away from him. It’s the headache, it’s confusing everything.
‘I’m sorry I had to do that to you, Ramesh. But if you understood –’
‘She bullied you,’ he says. I stare at him.
‘How did you know that?’
‘It’s not exactly hard to work it out. She hurt you, you hurt her. We’ve all been there. We’ve all imagined getting revenge. Except you can actually do it. That doesn’t make it okay.’
‘You don’t know what she did to me.’
‘I don’t care!’ His face twists and he dashes tears from his cheeks. ‘Nothing she could do would make torturing her okay. It’s not what us knights do.’
His words hit me harder than any insult Ollie could throw at me. Us knights. He thinks I belong, like him. It’s as though all the doubts I’ve had about myself are standing in front of me, demanding I stop running from them. I’ve known since the Tournament, deep down, that my inability – no, my unwillingness – to forgive is what’s holding me back. Ollie had accused me of wanting to be bullied, and in this moment I realise that he is right. The truth is, I’ve never wanted to let go of that part of me. Without it, who am I except something pitiable and broken?
‘Please,’ I say. ‘I can’t be thrown out. I need this.’
Ramesh doesn’t answer for an eternity. Then, finally, ‘All right.’
That’s it. He walks away.
‘You – you’re not going to tell?’ I run to catch up with him. He doesn’t reply, but he doesn’t try to avoid me either. He leads me back to Tintagel, where Phoebe and Rachel are waiting anxiously to sneak us back in.
‘You okay?’ Rachel says, more to Ramesh than me.
‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Fern just needed to get some air.’
Rachel smiles at me. ‘One of the harkers at the drawbridge thought you didn’t seem yourself and told me. It was Phoebe’s idea for Ramesh to follow you.’ I nod at Phoebe, praying that she won’t be suspicious of Ramesh’s unusual quietness and take it upon herself to dig deeper into my antics.
As Ostara approaches and our training ramps up, I sometimes catch Ramesh looking at me and feel certain that he’s wondering whether he made the right decision. In Ithr, I daydream that tonight will be the night I am met in Annwn by Lord Allenby, Ramesh lurking behind him. I’ll be told I’ve disgraced the knights, taken to the morrigans and sent back to Ithr an empty shell.
But every night I am proved wrong. Ramesh does not betray my confidence, and I go to great efforts to ensure that he has no more reason to do so.
‘Why are you letting me win?’ Ramesh asks me one night during our weapons’ training.
‘I’m not,’ I say lightly, turning away from his strike deliberately slowly, so that he’ll catch me.
Ramesh smacks the back of my leg with his spear and backs off, frowning.
‘It’s probably all the Immral training,’ I tell him. ‘It’s making me sloppy on my actual fighting.’
We start again, and I half-heartedly parry his blows with my scimitar until the teacher steps in to guide me.
‘Fern, you know you don’t need to do this, right?’ Ramesh says quietly as the teacher walks away. ‘If you’re worried about me telling anyone, I won’t.’
‘I’m not worried,’ I lie. It’s not that I’m worried about him telling anyone, my fear is very specific: I’m worried he’s going to tell Lord Allenby or, worse, my brother.
‘Good, because you know if you keep fighting me this badly I probably should tell them just to get you taken off the knights.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Well, you’re a danger to everyone right now, aren’t you?’
I twist my scimitar and Ramesh’s spear clatters to the ground. He smiles triumphantly. ‘I knew it.’
Panting, I retrieve his spear and hand it back to him. I don’t know how to play this at all. I’m not good enough at this kind of thing to balance keeping him onside with not making it obvious that I’m keeping him onside. As if he’s borrowed Ollie’s power and read my mind, Ramesh punches me lightly on the arm. ‘Friends don’t lie to friends, Fern. Come on, why are you being so nice to me all of a sudden?’
‘I’m always nice.’
He just looks at me.
‘Okay, yes, I’m terrified you’re going to tell Lord Allenby what I did.’
‘Even if I did – which I’m not, by the way – do you seriously think he’d throw you out of the thanes when you’ve got Immral?’
The idea that Lord Allenby might need me hadn’t occurred to me, even though it probably should have. I had been so preoccupied with the fact that he
didn’t want me in the thanes in the first place that I hadn’t considered that my power might change his opinion.
‘But … he should throw me out,’ I say.
Ramesh shrugs. ‘Maybe he would, I dunno. I’m just saying that if I was him, I’d probably stretch my principles a bit for you. Come on, let’s go again, and fight me properly this time. I want to actually get better.’
We circle each other once more.
‘Is that the only reason you didn’t tell him?’ I ask, spinning into the air to attack him from above.
‘So you wouldn’t get thrown out? Well, yeah,’ Ramesh huffs as he somersaults over my scimitar. ‘But not because of your power.’
‘What then?’ I throw myself forward in the air to thrust at his ankles.
‘Because we’re friends.’
With a thump, I fall to the ground. He lands next to me a little more gracefully and helps me to my feet.
‘But I’m not cool,’ I say.
‘Neither am I.’
‘I’m grumpy all the time. I never sit with you.’
‘True. But you want to, don’t you?’
I nod. Then the anxiety that has been gnawing up my throat for months finally reaches my mouth. ‘But I’m not supposed to be a knight.’
‘Who says?’
‘I wasn’t chosen like the rest of you.’
Ramesh looks genuinely bemused. ‘What does that matter? I’m not chosen for a lot of things in Ithr. Doesn’t make me any less of a person for doing them anyway.’
I don’t have an answer for that. The anxiety retreats into my stomach once more. Not gone but not as ravenous as it was. Ramesh gets me fighting again by punching me in the ribs with his spear handle, and we end up in a melee with the other Bedevere squires, prevailing at the eleventh hour with a move that sees Ollie and Phoebe cornered up a tree like lost cats.
That’s the start of it. Ramesh said he was my friend, and in the days that follow I begin to see that the others are too – Phoebe and Rafe, Natasha and Samson. If I arrive at the chamber before them, they will automatically join me. If I enter after them, I now choose to sit with them. When Phoebe finds something interesting in one of the books in the chamber, she will leave it on the arm of my chair with a note. Best of all, they were Ollie’s friends first, yet any cutting remark he makes towards me – more out of habit than real malice now – is either met with rolled eyes or ignored entirely. The guilt of what I did to Jenny becomes a second skin, but slowly the terror of what my actions might mean fade. I now know that I am not like her. I may have started to hurt her, but I couldn’t continue. I wouldn’t have, even if Ramesh hadn’t seen me. And with that knowledge, something strong and beautiful opens inside me.
Spring is firmly in the air in Ithr. Natasha had told us to expect lambs and chicks clogging up the streets back in Annwn, and flowers budding from between stone blocks. She’d warned us that the horses would be friskier. But a gloom has been hanging over Annwn for weeks now. This year no cute baby animals appear, and the stones remain resolutely grey. Lamb seems to move more slowly than before. We all know why. Medraut’s kalends are becoming a common sight in Annwn. The fact that the army of treitres hasn’t yet been sighted should be a blessing, but all it does is put us more on edge. We know they’re coming; we just don’t know when.
Ollie and I continue to work our way through Mum’s papers each night in the knights’ chamber, yawning after long training sessions, knowing that we’ll wake up to sore muscles and Dad chastising us for sleeping in yet again. Neither of us have found anything that might help us in the fight against Medraut, but nevertheless we continue. I wonder whether Ollie’s reason is the same as mine: because reading Mum’s work brings me closer to her.
Like the night when I spot Ollie’s face clouding over as he reads.
‘Found something?’ I ask.
He beckons me over. ‘Listen to this,’ he says.
‘Listen? What …?’ But Ollie has already grasped my arm. There’s the now-familiar arc of inspyre and the stab of pain, then my ears fill with a conversation had long ago. The words crackle as though I’m listening through a bad line, but one voice is unmistakably my mother’s.
‘I promised you I would find a way,’ she’s saying.
‘I don’t mind,’ says an unknown voice. A woman’s, if I’m not mistaken, timid like a rabbit. I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve heard a voice like it before.
‘I’m not going to let you down now.’
‘Maybe it’s for the best, Una. I’ve never belonged here. I’m not brave, like you.’
The voices fade out. Ollie and I look at each other, puzzled.
‘You heard this through the paper?’ I ask.
‘Weird, right? As soon as I touched it I felt that there was a memory attached to it.’
We both peer down at Mum’s writing. It’s dated November 1999 and it seems to be more research into morrigans, the sort of impenetrable essay that would interest Samson.
‘What was she up to, do you think?’ I whisper as the chamber door opens and the day-shift knights flood in.
‘I wish I knew,’ Ollie answers. ‘I wish I knew who she was talking to as well.’
I touch Mum’s lettering, skating over words I only half understand. Amygdala, trauma, eliminate. ‘I think she was talking to Ellen Cassell.’
‘Who?’ Ollie asks.
‘Lord Allenby said that Mum was friends with someone called Ellen, who struggled in the knights. She was one of the first knights to get killed by Medraut’s treitre.’
‘Poor girl,’ Ollie says. ‘Sounds like Mum persuaded her to stay and then she got killed anyway.’
Poor Ellen indeed. Her words – I’ve never belonged here – find a mirror in my soul. Was Mum her Ramesh, encouraging her to stay? Making her believe that she did have a place in this castle? I can’t help but feel as though whatever Mum was working on for Ellen holds a key that has a part to play in the oncoming storm. If only I knew what it would unlock.
38
With Ostara imminent, Tintagel pushes aside the threat posed by Medraut to celebrate. The graduation of the squires has traditionally been a time of raucous fun, with a feast and a no-holds-barred party after we return from our first proper patrol. This year the tone isn’t going to be quite as hedonistic, which I’m relieved about as wild partying was never really my scene, but there will still be a feast and festivities. I let myself be buoyed by the atmosphere, even though I know that it can’t last. As our training reaches its end, the reeves flurry around Tintagel to get the castle ready for the ceremony. Long tables line the hall. As Phoebe and I practise complicated battle moves in the castle gardens, apothecaries gather garlands of spring flowers from around us to decorate the archways. One night when we return from a practice patrol, actual trees, pregnant with blossom, are sprouting from the tables themselves, making the most spectacular centrepieces I’ve ever witnessed.
Then Ostara is here, and the reeves are placing platters filled with exotic fruits and cooked meats along the tables, and everyone’s smiling at each other, looking forward to their first patrol and then to the feast that will follow. Everything feels fresh, new, numb. I am hyper-aware of my body as I pull on my uniform, even though I’ve worn it hundreds of times. When we’re dressed, Ramesh pulls Phoebe and Ollie and I to one side and pulls a flask from his tunic.
‘Hot chocolate with a dash of lotus juice,’ he tells us, passing it round, ‘to mark our graduation.’
We each take a sip of the sweet, fiery liquid, quietly relishing each other’s company in our final few moments as squires. Then together, hands resting on each other’s backs, we wait for Lord Allenby’s traditional address.
‘You’ve all shown outstanding commitment and drive,’ he tells us. ‘I know that you’ll do your best to save every dreamer out there. But I want you to do something else for me – take care of yourselves, and take care of each other. As long as you do that, you can’t go far wrong.’
‘Bedevere
, over here!’ Samson calls. ‘We’re on the royal circuit. We’ll head as directly west as we can and cover Hyde Park first, okay?’
Everyone nods silently. My mouth is very dry.
‘Stay in training formation at first; new knights on the inside. Rafe, you’re up front with me. Amina and Nerizan, you protect the rear.’
It’s time to go. We file out of the chamber and march through the castle.
‘First patrol!’ Lord Allenby booms. The rest of the thanes cheer. I spot Rachel beaming from her place at the harkers’ desks. Up in the gallery, reeves and veneurs clap and whistle. Then we’re out of the castle and crossing the gardens. The concentration that fills the air as the new knights fumble with bridles and girths makes the usually roomy stables feel claustrophobic.
Lead horses outside, mount, form into regiments. One of the harkers at the gatehouse sounds a horn as the great drawbridge lowers. This is the only time of year that the horn will be used, to mark the graduation of another set of squires. The noise rolls like thunder around the gardens.
The other regiments cross first. I pull my back straight, trying to remember everything I’ve ever been taught about formations and strategy and how to stay upright on a horse. As if channelling my nerves, Lamb’s ears point robustly forwards instead of flopping about as usual.
‘You’ll be okay, girl,’ I whisper, smoothing her mane. ‘I’ll look after you.’
Ollie looks back at me. ‘You know it’s a sign of madness to talk to your pets, Fern.’
Balius bucks, as if to say, Who are you calling a pet, matey?
We cross the drawbridge, dozens of hooves pounding the wood. We round the corner, leaving Tintagel behind, and the spell breaks. We’re proper knights, at last.
‘Fall out, Bedevere!’ Samson shouts. Ollie, Phoebe and Ramesh cheer, and even Samson cracks a smile. I’m back in my body, here, now.
