It was a permanent heated agenda item at the open leader meetings. Art’s diplomacy and leadership were tested more than ever before, and for the first time since Thomas’s days, a penal code was resurrected. The Council called it a temporary measure while communities grew and integrated. But we all knew it was a by-product of the new conflict that was unlikely to disappear, and while the Ring had been nominated as a place where disputes could be resolved – the village grazing field stood in for those who couldn’t wait.
It was Raven who suggested using Arafel’s story nights as an opportunity for communities to exchange stories and history. There was plenty of scepticism at first, but the evenings bred a little ease as we learned about our new brothers and sisters. And each new community arrival meant one certainty to me: August was still out there, still breathing. Which somehow still eased my own.
A spotted tiger beetle scurried across the dirt floor before disappearing beneath a pile of large maple leaves. There was a momentary lull, before the telltale rustle, and a young corn snake slithered out looking satisfied. I watched unmoved. It was the way of the forest, from the smallest to the largest. Each and every species had its natural predator and check – all except, it seemed, for Lake.
I pictured her vast, scaled head and grey spiny body as I swung myself up between the thick fringed leaves of a papaya tree, intent on reaching the fruit weighing down the topmost branches. Her existence had been harder to explain to the Council.
‘Lake is believed to possess extraordinary strength, speed and agility. Cassius intends to recapture and use her against us.’
The Elders were still reeling from August’s bombshell about outside communities, when I shared the news that an unstable draco-chimera was also living among the mountainous peaks above our quiet valley. And their initial scepticism was rapidly replaced with palpable fear, even though I was careful to provide only as much detail as they really needed.
‘I’ve kept Lake’s chimera coding safe,’ I whispered to Grandpa, touching the tiny dart tube resting against my chest, just to reassure myself it was still there.
It was a small consolation, but one of the few I still had. Grandpa had entrusted the legacy of the Book of Arafel to me, and the circle of knowledge had grown so much since then. I had to trust that protecting the genetic coding of the Voynich’s oldest secret, as well as Thomas’s original cipher, would thwart Cassius, until the day he brought his war.
And found an army of freshly trained Outsiders waiting.
One of August’s key instructions, before he left, was that training and weapon instruction should take place in the outside forest. It was also where a skeleton shift of Arafel hunters, Komodos and Lynx warriors kept careful watch on the fringe of the forest every day. If there was to be a battle, it would be in the outer forest, away from Arafel, our home and the only real retreat we had. And there was no doubt we had a formidable Outsider army now with a wide range of skills and weaponry.
Training was intense and overseen by Bereg, Ida’s father, and a sharp Lynx captain called Marta. I assisted where I could, describing Cassius’s creatures and training some of the younger recruits in darting and knifing, but I escaped to hunt and forage whenever I could. It was the only time I got to escape, and pretend.
Somewhere above my head a lemur called a warning as a green lorikeet swooped low. I lowered my borrowed slingshot and watched its silent dive towards the forest floor, before it flew up and out of sight. There were still some compromises I couldn’t make, though we were trying to widen our diet as much as possible.
I leaned back into the fork of the gnarled papaya, and reached into my leather rations bag. It was still there, my lucky apricot stone. I withdrew it and rolled it around in my fingers, drawing some comfort from its mottled, wizened surface. It reminded me of the stone I’d rolled into the cage of the little apricot monkey; a seed from the outside world offering comfort and hope through the bars of Isca Pantheon. It was a promise I was determined to deliver.
A young monkey swung through the cedar branches opposite, and Ida’s turaco call followed. I frowned. We were asking the other outside communities for so much, but there were rules about the infant animals.
At the same time, a series of thin branches snapped in the bushes directly below me. Medium-sized … bold given its proximity … wild boar? Years of hunting had equipped me well when it came to assessing a potential meal and I focused on the bushes intently. A single bigger kill would keep everyone happy.
I drew Harlo’s slingshot back, my eyes narrowing as a swift silver blade suddenly flew through the opaque sunlight beneath me. A hoopoe cried its warning seconds too late as the blade impacted softly halfway up a neighbouring tree, while my intended quarry rustled away through the undergrowth.
Scowling, I watched as Ida’s different target swung through the low branches, screeching its distress. We’d made our feelings about young monkey meat clear, and while it was a Komodo delicacy, the forest couldn’t sustain the rate at which the tribe wanted to feast on them. Instinctively, I leapt into action, running swiftly through the neighbouring trees until I reached the baby bonnet macaque, which seemed frozen to the cedar trunk above the gleaming blade. My arrival startled it back into life, and it scurried swiftly up to the topmost branches, where a mature macaque chattered her relief.
Satisfied, I yanked the blade out of the trunk and dropped to the ground, just as the low grunting of a confident predator filled the air. I swung up into the nearest fork and swivelled to glance at the snorting creature, which was only a stone’s throw away. It had to be the same wild boar, and by the way it was squaring up to me, a hungry adult male.
‘First rule of the jungle: never hesitate or show doubt.’
Bereg’s training was entrenched in us all and his voice echoed through my head. Stealthily, I levelled Harlo’s slingshot just as a second flash of silver flew past and buried itself in the boar’s neck. It dropped forward onto its knees, eyeing me reproachfully, before collapsing in a growing pool of its own dark blood.
The bushes parted a moment later and Ida, clad in a leather sarong and beaded tunic top, strode past me, her long plaited ebony hair glistening in the iridescent light.
She reached down and placed her palm over the animal’s forehead as a mark of respect, before retrieving her knife and tucking it inside her leather waistband. Then she shot me a questioning glance, the painted seasons on her forehead and forked tongues around her oaken eyes crinkling with satisfaction. I swallowed my frustration and nodded; it was a clean kill and we were all hungry.
Together, we strapped the boar onto a short length of hickory using a mixture of rudimentary signing and gestures. It hung there, unprotesting, and now that I was closer I could see why it hadn’t run when it could. It was starving. I suppressed another frown as Ida lifted her trophy over her strong shoulders and melted back into the bushes. Then we set off at hunting pace, and I took my last forage into the trees among the leaves and birds.
The Komodo knew how to ground-run, even wearing a kill, and I had to concentrate to forage while keeping her dark silhouette in sight. A lone hoopoe’s echo rang among the branches as I ran down a twisted kapok branch and leapt into the tree opposite. It was an easy leap, and one Max and I used to navigate without blinking.
I set my teeth, refusing to let the memories consume me, as two fat pheasants ran out of the bushes below. I raised my slingshot instinctively, and within a heartbeat they were still. Relieved, I dropped to the forest floor and grabbed their scrawny legs, just as Ida pushed through the bushes. I held up a count of two, and it was her turn to nod, her lips parted in a garish smile that displayed her impressive Komodo teeth chiselled into tiny points.
Deftly, I strung the pheasants to my tunic belt, alongside my leather rations bag. It was full of wild roots, blueberries and the small papaya. The wild roots would provide an alternative stock to our usual cultivated vegetables, and now there was the boar and pheasant. It had been a good early shift. The sun
was glinting through the dense foliage, casting longer shadows across the forest floor, which meant it had to be approaching breakfast time. I gesticulated at the sky and Ida nodded.
We set out again, two hunters from different communities bringing food to share. It was progress, I told myself as a jaybird darted low in front of us, dropping the remainder of its meal onto the forest floor.
In a breath, the jungle melted away, and I was free-falling towards the glass river with its slow snaking arms and muted starlight. My eyes closed briefly and I willed it to consume me, to take me back to oblivion. But the jungle loomed back anyway with its coarse sunlight and unapologetic life. I was conscious of a rush of disappointment, before a cool palm on my cheek. I longed to fold into it, to take the comfort my silent friend offered, but I’d learned the hard way that caring led only to pain.
I quickened my pace. We’d stayed too long today.
Chapter 5
‘Astra inclinant, sed non obligant.’
August’s whisper was barely there, but his pain was as clear as a monsoon moon.
I tried to resist the dream but it fought back, tightening its hold, and trapping me inside my own memory. I told myself that I would wake soon, that I should focus on breathing, but each inhalation drew nails over my lungs. Raking in and raking out. Shouldn’t it be easier than this now?
‘The stars incline us … they do not bind us,’ I whispered, a hazy echo of Grandpa’s wisdom reaching through.
August watched me, his silence saying nothing and everything all at once.
‘I am not bound by this,’ I repeated, staring at my aching, blistered fingers as clearly as though we were back there.
I was bluffing though.
We both knew it. It was the thing that always undid me, his unerring ability to read my thoughts, no matter how hard I tried to block him out. I fixed my gaze on the flames, feeling none of their warmth. We’d come so far over the mountains together; and yet the distance was growing.
If August hadn’t gone to Europa, if I hadn’t asked Max to save Aelia, if we hadn’t run after the Prolets, if I’d stayed with Eli …
The charges went on, the guilt was asphyxiating and yet every cell of my disloyal body wanted to steal inside his battle-worn arms. To let him take me far away from the perishing mountains, Isca Pantheon and everything we knew.
I stretched out and let my fingers rest over his as I stared into the dancing flames. I didn’t need to look at him to know the fresh lines the North Mountains had etched in his face. He didn’t need to know how his vulnerability weakened me, and made me remember the first time I saw him look like that back in Aelia’s cave in Isca Prolet. That time.
His fingers closed over mine, and even though it was a dream, I could feel their question as clearly as though he’d whispered the words.
Unus had ventured out for firewood, and was likely to be a while given the sparse mountain shale. And this tiny mountain cave tucked away from the harsh, unforgiving elements had created a brief reprieve none of us had expected. It was precious time together, perhaps the last we would ever have.
Suddenly I felt like the naive girl he’d smuggled into his rooms in Pantheon. Trapped, uncertain, doubting everything he said and yet wanting so much to believe him too. His eyes crinkled as a ghost smile played across his lips.
‘I think the stars bind us more than we know.’
His whisper made me shiver.
‘And I would have given up a long time ago if it wasn’t for you. Your kind have a feral hunger for survival that my … Pantheonites … have long forgotten.’
‘Kind? Since when did you start getting fussy about a couple of chromosomes?’
His eyelids lowered briefly, but I could see his iris-blues were dulled. It terrified me. I could just about cope with anything but his mental defeat. The void loomed as he stared down at his noble hands, designed for Equite service, not the precipitous North Mountains at the start of the stormy season.
‘We are who we become,’ I added. ‘The only legacy that counts is the one we leave behind.’
‘Unless we happen to be the last guardian of the Book of Arafel,’ he responded with a glint of a smile, ‘then it’s just a simple matter of fulfilling ancient prophecies, and going down in history as the girl who saved the world.’
I rolled my eyes at him, suddenly aware he was moving – getting up and settling back down. Behind me. I stiffened as he reached his arm around me, pulling me tight in a way that said everything. It was the closest we’d been since waking up beside the glass river in the Dead City. And it prompted a river of gold to chase my veins, dazzling and beguiling gold that carried me away from the perilous mountains to a place where pain was a stranger. I mumbled something, unintelligible words, but they lacked any kind of commitment. My body was winning a very short race. Some legacy I was turning out to be.
‘What are you thinking about?’
His whisper made the hairs at the back of my neck stir traitorously.
‘Failure.’
The word danced among the flickering flames.
‘What do you think is going to happen?’
I wasn’t even sure I’d spoken the question aloud.
‘To us?’ he breathed, drawing a finger down my cheek and awakening the elephant moths I’d thought long since flown.
‘To them,’ I amended, when I could trust my voice.
The only sound was the crackling of the scarlet flames we had nursed to life minutes before, before he exhaled raggedly – one breath that told me that he too was holding the world inside.
‘Perhaps, if they’re lucky, the same that happened to us? But they were so …’
I nodded, recalling the slow, agonizing moment Cassius’s arrow had buried itself at the top of Max’s spine, and the strange waxen sheen on Aelia’s skin. I’d known the truth even before Grey arrived. Yet the Oceanids had revived us …?
‘Octavia once told me, the harder the revival, the higher the price.’
I twisted around to find August’s swarthy, windburned face only millimetres away.
His words whispered through me as I stared upwards into the face that had challenged everything since the day we met. He was Octavia’s blueprint, one of her first experiments, destined for the highest office in Isca Pantheon, and yet here he was, lying beside a feral Outsider. Offering what little comfort he could. What alignment of stars had created such an alliance? And were we really free of them in the end?
His military tunic was undone at the neck, revealing honey skin, and the glint of his Equite mark just snaking over the curve of his shoulder. A slow flush crept upwards from my neck that had nothing to do with the fire. How could he make me feel this way, despite everything?
‘Price?’ I repeated.
He nodded, his eyes burning into mine in a way that made the cave recede.
‘For all revivals the Oceanids demand a payment of sorts: either an equitable trade or promise of recompense.’
I swallowed. They’d kept my old slingshot, but I knew that wasn’t what he meant.
‘Then what did I … we …?
‘Promise or give in exchange?’
There was a heavy silence as we both weighed the enormity of the suggestion.
‘I’m not certain … but as the other legends seem to be holding true …’
I struggled for breath. I could feel the dream loosening its hold.
His words conjured up an uncomfortable, distant memory. A dark promise, uttered deep within the depths of the icy waters, yet just as binding as if it were echoed from the top of a sun-drenched mountain.
‘Lia and Eli … they wouldn’t want us to give up Tal.’
His raw dark blues were emptying into mine, saying everything in case there was never another time.
I nodded again, a rock in my throat, as he gently traced the exact spot, his touch somehow relieving the constriction. And for the first time since leaving the Dead City, I allowed my thoughts to settle on home and whether I would ever
see Mum again. The thought raked through what was left inside, making it soft and raw.
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
His whisper burned through me, like the first sun on ice-white snow. I opened my mouth but my voice, like my grief, was empty. And that was the moment. The moment I was guilty of wanting to forget – more than being unable to forget.
I slipped my fingers inside his open tunic collar, and let them rest against his insignia, burned into his golden skin. Her mark, just tangible beneath his warm skin, the ring of jellyfish protein that announced his modified DNA status to the world. It was his gateway into Octavia’s elite club, and the mark of the damned. And yet he couldn’t be any less hers now.
‘We have a saying in Arafel,’ I whispered, ‘that one feral heart can only be well met—’
His lips were against mine before I could finish, and if there was ever any doubt that our journeys were meant to cross, it was answered here and now, while the mountain storms raged. Our need became a heat that blurred the freezing night, and a belief that somewhere there was a parallel world where two people could travel their own path beneath the stars that guided them. And as I dug my fingers into his shoulders, his touch misting every ache and pain, I knew this was where it had all been leading.
That the mark we were making was one last act of defiance, proving free will was always the real legacy anyway.
Chapter 6
The moonlight was illuminating the floorboards like an old-world piano. I rested back against Grandpa’s willow chair. This had always been my safe place: my back against his legs, my cheek against his knee. Tonight though, I could only rest my weary head against his empty seat, and watch the night alone.
Storm of Ash Page 3
