by Holly Race
‘I’ve got him now. You did right by him. But whatever you’re doing to freeze it, Fern, please don’t stop. I’m not sure we could outrun it if it got moving again.’
I nod, but I’ve no idea how I stopped the treitre in the first place, so I’m at a bit of a loss. As Lamb breaks into a jerky trot, I tap into the pain that’s coursing through my head. If my power over Mum’s killer is linked to my blindness, then so long as I stay blind maybe the treitre will remain frozen. I keep my eyes open so we’ll get some warning if my sight starts to return. Sounds and touch become sharp. Every quiet command of Samson’s is like a drill next to my ear. Every tiny misstep Lamb makes sends pain coursing through my body. Unable to see and constantly worrying about the monster behind us makes the journey feel ten times longer.
‘Nearly there,’ Samson whispers. ‘Rachel, do we have a clear path?’
I can’t hear Rachel’s reply because I cast aside my helmet during the fight, but I’ve got bigger things to worry about. My sight is returning. The pain is as bad as ever, but the darkness is starting to recede. As terrifying as it was being totally blind, getting my sight back has a more frightening implication.
‘Hurry, please!’
This limbo of not being able to see clearly is worse than having no sight at all, because my hearing starts to fade as well. I mistake the echoes of hooves with the tap tap of golden claws. When the drawbridge finally creaks open, I am ready to pass out from the anxiety.
Noise explodes all around me. Everyone is shouting, a few are crying. Someone is wailing.
‘Only one from Dagonet got out alive.’
‘Why didn’t the harkers spot them?’
‘He’s waking up. Ollie? Ollie?’
Ollie’s voice rings through the courtyard, silencing all others.
‘Why is no one looking after my sister?’
‘He’s in shock,’ someone says. ‘It’s okay, Ollie, calm down –’
‘Look at her!’
The silence that echoes around the courtyard is like the numbness that spreads through my body. Why is he saying that? What do I look like?
Then someone else screams. The treitre must be back. What if it’s managed to get past the drawbridge? How can I protect everyone when I’m in this state? The pain is worse than it’s ever been. I don’t know how much longer I can stand it.
‘I need help here!’ I recognise the voice of Drew the apothecary. Cool hands peel me off Lamb’s back and grasp my face.
‘My God,’ he breathes. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
Dimly, I realise that the scream wasn’t about the monster. It was about me. Feeling strangely calm, as though I’m the doctor enquiring about a patient, I ask, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Her eyes!’ another voice says, hysterical.
Slowly, I place my fingers over my eyes. Something warm and gooey is oozing from them. As I remove my hands, my eyesight flashes back and I can see clearly again. My hands are red. Blood. I am bleeding from my eyes.
40
‘No signs of epilepsy before?’ a voice is saying.
‘Never.’ That’s Dad, sounding hoarse.
‘She’s coming round,’ Ollie says, much closer.
I don’t really want to open my eyes but now Ollie’s given the game away I don’t have much choice. The room’s too bright and the smell of chlorine makes me want to throw up. The vomit hits Ollie on its way to the floor.
‘Srrree,’ I gurgle.
Dad’s face swims into focus. ‘How are you feeling, Ferny?’
‘Grrrrmmmh.’
He stinks of cigarettes, but that can’t be right because he gave up years ago. The buzz of voices elsewhere in the hospital is painfully magnified. I reach for my memories. Golden claws. Ramesh’s head. Blood across my face, some of it mine, some of it not. The pain in my head is matched by a horrendous ache in my heart. He can’t be dead. Last night can’t have happened. A bad dream, I want to reassure myself, except that knowing what I now know about dreams, that’s no consolation at all.
A doctor peers over Dad’s shoulder.
‘She’ll need bedrest for a few days, and we’ll need to get her back in for regular tests. It might be a simple eye infection, it might be something else. I don’t expect us to get to the bottom of this straight away. We can keep her here, or …’
‘Nnnmmmm.’ The word isn’t coming out properly. I can’t stay here. My portal must be back in my bedroom, and without it I won’t be able to get back into Annwn. Ramesh will be there, I’m sure. It will be a cruel prank. They’ll all be in on it. They’ll laugh at my shocked face and congratulate each other on a joke well played – Ramesh, Phoebe, Samson, Rafe … Please let it just be bad-taste banter. Please.
‘We can bring her home, can’t we, Dad?’ Ollie says. I cast him what I hope he realises is a grateful look.
‘Can we, Doctor? I’d rather I could stay with her.’
When we finally make it home, it takes both Dad and Ollie to half walk, half push-pull me up our narrow stairs. I don’t know whether that says more about my weight or their fitness.
‘Like a pig in a blanket,’ Dad says, tucking the duvet under my chin like I’m five again. I’d never admit it, but I like it when he does this. I am filled with the urge to keep him beside me.
‘What happened? I don’t remember anything apart from the hospital.’
‘It was your brother. Woke me up banging on my door, saying something was wrong with you.’ He glances at Ollie, who’s lurking in the doorway.
Ollie shrugs. ‘One of those twin things, I guess.’
‘Anyway,’ Dad continues, ‘I’m afraid I had to break your door down because you’d locked it, love. At first I couldn’t see anything wrong, then I turned the light on and … well, you’ve looked better, darling. It was like your whole face was bleeding. I thought you must have scratched yourself or your burn had opened up again. It was only on the way to the hospital that I got a chance to clean you up and saw it was leaking from your eyes. Your nose and ears as well. Do you not remember any of it?’
I remember far too much. ‘No, nothing.’
Dad laughs shakily. ‘Some nightmare, eh?’
You’ve no idea.
He pats my duvet again.
‘Hot chocolate, the proper stuff?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Coming up.’ He slips out, past Ollie, who doesn’t seem inclined to follow. My brother looks uncertainly at the chair next to my desk, but then obviously thinks better of it and makes to leave.
‘Wait,’ I say. Then, ‘Thanks.’
He shrugs. The final moments of last night are coming back to me, and in amidst everything else I remember the panic in Ollie’s voice. Why is no one looking after my sister? I wasn’t in any state to acknowledge it then, but now I allow myself to consider the possibility that perhaps Ollie does care for me after all. It feels disloyal to Ramesh to smile at this, but I can’t help it. I have wanted my brother to come back to me for five long, bitter years.
I’m about to tell Ollie that I’m almost sure the golden treitre was the one that killed our mother, but then I remember the look of shock on his face before it threw him into the wall.
‘You know, don’t you? About the treitre and Mum.’
Ollie nods. ‘I saw its memories when I grabbed its tail. You were right.’
‘It showed you Mum’s death?’
‘It was right there, like it had just been remembering it.’
The thought of it bolts through my chest. I want to know exactly what he saw, but I don’t. Now it isn’t Ramesh’s head I envision, but Mum’s. Her wild hair matted with blood, her thin neck sliced through, her eyes open but unseeing. Unbidden, I start sobbing.
‘Don’t,’ I hear him say, his own voice wobbly.
‘I’m not.’
I try to stem the tears, rubbing my hand across my nose and spreading a snotty, salty mess across my upper lip. I have to say something, to take my mind off the images playing through my head. Li
ke an operation gone wrong. That was what Clemmie had said. If that was just the echo of her murder, what was actually done to her in Annwn? I skirt around the idea at first. It’s too gruesome. It’s too intimate. But the need to know is overwhelming.
I take a deep breath and ask Ollie for a favour for the first time in years. ‘Will you show me?’
My brother and I are standing in Annwn, looking over the city from the battlements of the Tower of London. An executioner’s block takes pride of place in the grass courtyard below us. As I watch, a man in a smock materialises and steps up to the block. I look away before the act itself, but can’t un-hear the thud of axe on wood. On the other side of the wall, I can see the very spot where my portal brought me to Annwn.
It’s strange being in Annwn during the daytime. Everything’s quieter. The dreamers who sleep during the day don’t seem to frequent this part of the city in their dreams. For the most part inspyre drifts aimlessly through the streets, waiting for night to fall in Ithr.
‘So?’ I ask, reluctant to repeat my request. I hold out my hand, but Ollie doesn’t take it.
‘No, this is sick, Fern! I don’t want to see it again. I don’t know why I agreed to this.’
He moves away and I almost slip over as I rush after him. ‘You can’t just change your mind!’ I say, grabbing his arm. As I touch him, my sight is replaced by the treitre’s memory. I was prepared for that, and for the arc of inspyre as I grabbed my twin. But I wasn’t prepared to see my mother. I’ve heard her voice, and I’ve seen photos and paintings of her, but this is different. She is before me, fiercely alive.
Ollie’s voice bleeds through. ‘Fern, I don’t think you should see this.’
‘I have to.’
The images come quickly. A look of shock on Mum’s face as human becomes treitre and picks her up, hurling her against the wall. The monster goes to her, holds her unconscious body in its arms, laying her down on the ground as a lover might. Then, with a sudden lurch, it launches at her, spurred on by a thought I’m not able to understand. It tears into her, as though it wants to remove everything that made her Una Gorlois.
Raking her face, her chest, stabbing those vicious claws through her legs. She was dead after the first few blows, but each new assault rips through my heart. By the time the monster’s satisfied, Mum’s clothes are in tatters, and her body is more blood than skin. Her eyes, though. Her eyes are still open, and they are looking straight at the monster. Two claws extend, hovering over the unseeing pupils. As they press down, I pull away from Ollie. I can’t watch that final desecration.
For a long time, neither of us speaks. I walk further along the wall, away from the place where it happened. Ollie stays where he was. The executioner’s axe in the courtyard below thunks once more. A cold wind sweeps along the river from the distant sea. I tug at my jumper fruitlessly. That’s when I notice that my hands are shaking.
I glance back at my brother, staring fixedly at the spot where Mum was butchered. If that scene had been playing through my head for the last twelve hours, I wouldn’t want to talk about it either. I’d want to block it out, to march up to the eyrie and demand a morrigan suck it out of my head.
‘Did you see anything else when you read its mind?’ I ask.
‘A lot of the memories were of Mum. There were a few of the other knights it killed. Did you know it carved something on its victims’ weapons?’
I shake my head and we lapse into silence again. I look out towards Tower Hill station. Mum’s portal was linked to that station. She died so close to it. Had she just arrived, I wonder, or was she on her way back to Ithr when the treitre had caught her?
‘Did you notice anything, before it turned into the treitre?’ Ollie asks.
I think about those first seconds, where the treitre must have been in its human body, and shake my head. ‘We were inside the treitre’s mind, weren’t we? We’d only see who they were if we could see it from Mum’s point of view. Why are you asking that?’
‘It’s probably nothing,’ Ollie says. ‘It’s just … why did it act like that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, when the treitre attacked us it was just killing us off as quickly as it could until you got involved. There was no emotion, was there? But with Mum it was different. It was upset when it killed her, I could feel that. Then after she was dead it got angry.’
I see what he means – it was acting differently from how it did last night.
‘Why, though?’
Ollie shrugs. ‘I’ve been wondering that all day, and I still can’t figure it out.’
We look out over the Tower courtyard, towards the Thames, both desperately trying to understand the mysterious human shrouded in the deadly, golden skin of the treitre.
41
I had hoped to spend the day curled up in bed, forgetting the events of last night, but it wasn’t meant to be. Eyes open or closed, I can’t stop the memories. The blood, those claws, Ramesh smiling, then Ramesh dead. I don’t even know how many in my regiment survived. And Mum. Again and again I see the treitre slicing into her in its inexplicable frenzy. Eventually I crawl downstairs, every step bringing a wave of nausea from the headache that’s been plaguing me since I woke up.
Dad’s watching some old sitcom. Usually I’d turn my nose up at it, but when Dad fetches a blanket I snuggle into it, resting my head on his chest, feeling it rumble as he laughs silently. As I lie there, it occurs to me that my life used to be as simple as those characters’. They have straightforward emotions. I used to be the same: anger, rage, loneliness, nothing in between. I was who I was and that was that. The knights has complicated things. Now there are two Ferns: the scarred loner who’s cuddled up to her dad because she’s not feeling well, and the knight who has opened her heart to friends only to watch one of them be brutally killed. Here, I’m still an innocent, even if I’d never thought of myself that way before. In Annwn, that innocence has been ripped away.
I fall asleep again, head in Dad’s lap, until Ollie gets back from school.
‘Have you seen the news?’ he asks, casting a significant glance my way. He throws a copy of the Evening Standard onto the sofa. While Dad makes a start on dinner, I pick up the paper. The front page is a collage of faces. Most of them are posed school photos. Some of them show teenagers clutching beloved pets, or kissing trophies.
SLEEP OF DEATH, reads the headline.
Ollie is talking quietly to Dad in the kitchen. ‘Loads,’ I hear him say. ‘Hundreds, they reckon.’
Dad doesn’t reply. He puts some bread in the toaster, then leans heavily on the countertop. ‘Thank God it wasn’t Ferny,’ he whispers.
I look at the photos again, blinking back tears.
A caption at the bottom of the page says, Story continued on page 5. I flick through. Hundreds of dead. That means …
This morning many in the UK woke up to a living nightmare as hundreds of people have died, apparently peacefully, in their sleep. It is estimated that over four hundred men, women and children died overnight in what coroners and doctors are calling a ‘mysterious mass tragedy’ …
I skip through the text. Sentences pop out at me.
Sixty-one dead in the Greater London area alone …
Some family members reported that their loved ones sported what looked like cuts on their skin, although these later faded …
Dad turns the channel to the news, where a reporter lists some of the dead, their photos appearing in a corner of the screen as she speaks. I have to stifle a cry when I recognise Emory, who it turns out ran a tiny charity in Ithr.
I take the paper with me as I rush out of the room.
‘Fern? Love?’ my dad calls.
I lean my back against my bedroom door and force myself to return to the newspaper. A few pages on there’s a list of London’s dead, with photos and captions giving the superficial details of their lives. It goes on for pages and pages. I search for one face in particular. Then I spot him. The forehead’s a little
larger, the jaw’s a little weaker, and he’s wearing a brace, but it’s unmistakably Ramesh.
Reyansh Haldar, 15. Student at St Mary’s Grammar School in Bow. Terrence Smedwick, Headmaster of St Mary’s, told the Standard …
He didn’t live that far from me. When he followed me to Jenny’s house he would have been on familiar turf. We could even have passed each other in the street. I wonder why he changed his name to Ramesh Hellier for the knights. I suppose I wouldn’t have wanted anyone from my Annwn life to have recognised me in Ithr, and thanks to my burn scar I don’t have to worry about that too much. Maybe Ramesh was erecting his own walls between his two lives in the only way he could.
I avoided boys like him in Ithr, knowing they’d only give more fuel to my bullies – Oh, how sweet, the freak and the geek. But I cannot bear the thought of an Annwn without him riding by my side, making silly jokes as if my smile is a trophy to be won.
It takes me a long time to pluck up the courage to open my portal tonight. The image of Ramesh’s torso falling from his horse, of the weight of his severed head in my arms, won’t go away. When I take my mother’s mirror from its place in my drawer, I freeze. All I can picture is the golden treitre waiting at the platform in Tintagel to finish me off. Even when I convince myself I’ll be fine, my hands shake so badly it takes me three attempts to open my portal.
I’m not the only one who’s late. Everyone is gathering in the hall. I spot Phoebe leaning against a wall. Her forehead is sporting a deep gash and her skin is mottled with bruises.
‘I’m giving you an imaginary hug.’ She smiles wanly as I rush up to her. ‘But if you try to give me a real one I will scream in pain.’
Samson and Rafe arrive with a chair for Phoebe to sit on.
‘You okay?’ Samson asks me. ‘I … We were all worried about you.’
Before I can reply, the reeve captain directs everyone to shuffle into lines. I look around the hall for the first time. Altogether there can’t be more than thirty knights left. Nearly a hundred rode out of the castle last night.
‘Is this everyone?’
