by Kit Peel
“One more sound out of you and you’ll be getting an up-close look at beech roots,” said Thwaite.
“Of all the lousy, stinking earthers …” said Tawhir, only falling silent when he had been dragged down to his chin.
Thwaite went down on one knee in front of Wyn, looking deep into her eyes.
“Do you know how you can communicate with the trees?”
“No,” said Wyn.
“And you have no memories of a past life? None whatsoever?”
Wyn’s heart was pounding and her mouth had turned dry. Was this the meaning behind the strange dreams she’d had since her earliest years? Often Robin had talked in sermons about the cycle of life, death and rebirth — much to the annoyance of some of his parishioners — and his words had always unsettled Wyn. But the idea that they could actually be true, and that Wyn had lived before and remembered that life in her dreams …
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
“Of course you do,” said Tawhir, spitting out snow as he spoke.
“Oh, hold your noise,” said Thwaite, and the boy was sucked down further, protesting furiously. Face, hair and finally shaking fists vanished. There was a muffled sound underground and then silence. The earth spirit returned his attention to Wyn. While his face was as lean as winter, his green eyes still held a little of the youth of spring, a last act of defiance against the cold.
“We’ve had no summer this year,” Thwaite told Wyn. “There’s been no thaw and none coming. In just three days, this moon will be gone and summer will be over, not just for this year but for who knows how many years to come. A terrible ice age will descend upon the world and all its living beauty will die. But I believe there is one supreme spirit who has the power to bring back summer.
“Her death heralded the start of the cold weather. Many of my kind believed that she had been reborn somewhere in the world and would return to us one day. But as the years passed and the snows crept into spring and then turned our summers white, still she didn’t come back. Some of my kind lost all hope. But a few of us, like Tawhir, kept searching for her. It was an impossible task, like looking for a single blade of grass in all the fields of the dale.”
Wyn’s head spun. She felt sick and faint all at once. Unable to bear Thwaite’s searching eyes, she concentrated on the snow at her feet.
“You think Wyn is this missing … spirit?” she heard Robin ask.
“I don’t know what to think. Since she was first found in the dale, I’ve kept my eye on her. Until now she’s shown almost nothing more than a little skill in Jane March’s garden. It’s hard to believe that the one we are looking for would, or could, keep her true powers hidden for all these years. And harder to believe that she would have returned in human form. The boy, on the other hand, says he knew Wyn in her old life and is convinced it’s her.”
Wyn’s mind raced. Was that why Tawhir felt so familiar to her? Whenever she had dreamt of the valley in the mountains, Wyn had always had the feeling that there was someone else there with her, like a shadow by her side. And yet, in all her dreams, she’d never seen the face of this other person. Was it Tawhir? Even though she was sure that she had known him before, something about the boy and the shadow didn’t match up.
Wyn forced herself to look up from the white ground.
“What do you want from me?” she whispered.
“What do you want from yourself? That’s the true question. None of us know how Mugasa died. And if you truly are her reincarnation there’s a reason that you have stayed hidden from us for so long. In my meadows I have flowers that leap up one year and then don’t show themselves for decades. I’ve tried my best to figure out why, and I still can’t come up with a good answer. It’s not wind or rain, sunshine or the pull of the moon; it’s not cold winters, short summers or a change in the earth. No, they wake when their hearts tell them to. For three thousand summers I’ve watched over all the living things of this dale, but I’ve never been master of their hearts, and I would not try to be the master of yours. This is your decision, Wyn. Only you know if it’s time to wake.”
“What about Kate? If I was this missing person, would I be able to make her better?”
Thwaite rose to his feet and retrieved his pack and axe.
“If you are who the boy thinks you are, you will have the power to change the world.”
With a word to his dog, the barefoot man strode off uphill, into the shadows. Wyn listened to his footsteps and the crashing noise Pip was making as she bunny-hopped after him through the deep snow. She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling her heart pounding in her chest.
“Listen to me, love,” said Robin. “Forget about everything else, even Kate. What is your heart telling you?”
In answer, anger surged within Wyn. A fierce anger and a voice that told her to defy all of them and stay hidden. The voice was like her own, but amplified a hundred-fold and so powerful that Wyn rocked on her feet and might have fallen back into the snow had Robin not reached out to steady her.
At his touch, the voice receded and Wyn’s heart once again reached out for Kate and Tawhir. But even as it did, the echo of that great voice lingered within Wyn, warning her of something. Though what it was, she didn’t understand.
“What is it, Wyn?” Robin was asking.
“Nothing. I’m fine. I want to go with him.”
“Are you sure?”
Again the voice rose up in warning, and again Wyn ignored it, nodding to Robin.
Her foster father took her hand, then called out to Thwaite. The old man stopped and waited while Robin and Wyn trudged up to him.
“Now you take good care of her,” said Robin. “And if anything happens to her, anything at all, you’ll have me to answer to.”
“Go home, son,” said Thwaite, reaching forward and briefly squeezing Robin’s shoulder.
“Come back to us the second you want to,” Robin told her. But as he said it, Wyn saw the sadness in his eyes and had the same feeling that she’d experienced the last time she’d said goodbye to Mrs. March in hospital. She stood awkwardly, wanting to hug the priest, but unable to. There were tears in his eyes when he leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead.
He gave her a warm smile and Wyn forced a smile back. Then Robin was gone, walking downhill through the trees in his quick, jerky way.
The iron gate clanged shut in the distance.
Thwaite led Wyn to the large ash, whose roots had grown around a large boulder. It was the same tree she’d crouched beside with Kate, Lisa and John a few days ago when they had watched the bees.
He was about to lay his hand on it, when he bent down and scooped up a handful of snow. Amongst the glittering white flakes were the brown and yellow stripes of a bee. Carefully Thwaite blew away the snow from the tiny creature’s wings. With his free hand he delved into his pocket and brought out a small jar and prised off the lid. A pungent smell of honey filled the air. Thwaite dabbed in a finger and offered it to the bee. It stirred, drowsy, then set to work on the honey, crawling over Thwaite’s finger until he shook it off into the roots of the ash.
“And not so far, next time,” he called after it, before stroking the trunk of the tree.
Wyn watched in amazement as, with a lot of creaking and cracking, the roots of the tree pushed the boulder out and to one side, just like a door opening. Taking the collie and his axe in one arm, Thwaite went backwards into the opening.
“Well, come on now,” he said to Wyn, before disappearing from sight.
Wyn watched Pip’s eyes looking up at her, as man and dog swayed their way downwards on a ladder of roots and twined brambles. Warm air rose up from the hole, carrying a rich fragrance of flowers.
Wyn lowered herself onto the ladder. When she was a few rungs down, the ash creaked as it drew the boulder back into its roots. Wyn scarcely noticed. She climbed down into the eart
h, her eyes widening at the extraordinary scene that lay beneath her.
12
—
Wyn had left winter and climbed down into summer.
The air was deliciously warm and wet, full of the scent of flowers and wood smoke. Jumping off the last rung of the ladder into long grass, Wyn turned slowly around, scarcely believing what lay before her.
She was standing in a meadow in an enormous cavern, at least fifty feet high and so huge that it must have stretched the whole length of the wood above. Water was dripping from the roots of trees that dangled down from the cavern roof. At the edge of the meadow, a bonfire crackled brightly. She saw other bonfires further off. The dripping water and the fire smoke filled the cavern with a murky haze.
Before, in the wood, everything Thwaite and Tawhir had been saying had felt a little unreal to Wyn. They had been talking about a world that she had only ever glimpsed in dreams. Now she felt that those dreams had been made real. The color and beauty of this place rippled through her body, making her want to shout out with delight.
A little way ahead, Thwaite was surrounded by chattering birds that mobbed the air around him before landing, sometimes three at a time, on his hand. He looked at each one intently. The birds responded with bobbing heads, chirps and sharp bursts of song.
Muffled yells and movement caused Wyn to look up. A pair of thrashing legs was dangling from the cavern roof. She recognized the black jeans and pointed leather shoes.
“Is he all right?” Wyn asked.
“Wind spirits will do anything for attention. He can get out whenever he wants,” said Thwaite. His words brought more furious kicking.
“What is this place?”
“See for yourself,” replied Thwaite, returning his attention to the birds in his hands.
Wyn wandered away from him, peering and inspecting. Many of the wildflowers that had lined the track up to Mrs. March’s house were there: the whites of stitchwort and cow parsley that used to make the old woman sneeze and the hot pinks of red campion and foxgloves, tall and forbidding.
One meadow led into another; a purple expanse of betony and knapweed that narrowed into a path between brambles and willow herb. Pushing through the path, Wyn stepped out into a glade of rowan and cherry trees, her ears full of the roar of bees. All the bees in Nidderdale must be down here, Wyn thought, as she skirted around the edge of the trees. Wyn saw what looked like giant eggs made of straw, leaves and twigs hanging amongst the upper branches of the trees. At the bottom of each egg, the straw fanned out into a small opening. Bees streamed in and out of these openings and Wyn realized that they must be beehives, but unlike any she had ever seen.
Squirrels were clambering over many of the hives, joined frequently by birds carrying twigs and plant stalks. Wyn watched, astonished, as the birds deposited their loads beside the squirrels, who would then set to work weaving the fresh materials into the hives. All across the glade squirrels were hard at work, some repairing hives, others weaving them from scratch and all the time being supplied by convoys of blue tits, linnets, goldfinches and numerous other small birds Wyn hadn’t seen in the dale since last year.
But as she watched all the animals, Wyn began to notice that there was something very wrong about this strange, subterranean summer. The birds flew too fast, the bees jostled each other on flower heads and there was panic in the leap and hurry of the squirrels. The excitement that Wyn had first felt when she’d looked around the cavern was quickly leaching away, replaced by a deep sadness. This place was an illusion of summer and the animals knew it, however hard they tried to fool themselves. With a heavy heart, she made her way back to Thwaite.
He was waiting for Wyn in a meadow on the far side of the glade. He was sitting amongst trefoil, watching a pair of blue butterflies dancing from side to side over the yellow flowers, dodging the water that dripped continually down from the roof of the cavern.
“Did you do all this?” asked Wyn.
“Most of it. The animals helped, of course. There’s every type of plant, bush and tree that grows in the dale down here. They wouldn’t have survived another winter up top, so I made the cavern and filled it as best I could. It’ll protect them, for a little longer.”
“How much longer?”
“Perhaps a year. Two for the strongest. But this is no home for living things. They need sun on their faces and wind in their bones. Every day I’m losing some and they’re not coming back. And there’s nothing I can do to stop it. There’ll be other earth spirits with caverns like this who will keep things going on a little longer. But sooner or later, if this winter holds, even the greatest of my kind will bow to the inevitable.”
“How many like you are there?”
“What did Robin tell you?”
“Just that you and the other spirits looked after nature.”
Thwaite led her out of the meadow, into a circle of silver birches, underplanted with a deep blue carpet of veronica. The embers of a small fire glowed in the heart of the circle, with a pile of rotten wood beside it. He picked up a branch, turning it in his huge hands.
“In the early days of the world, there were no spirits. Left to their own devices the forces of nature were wild, unbridled. Chaos reigned. To bring some order to the chaos, the earth created the spirits. They were created as guardians of nature, each with responsibility over individual elemental forces: wind, fire, ice, water and earth, which it is my task to protect.
“We live for a long time, but are not immortal. When our lives are ending, the earth brings forward a new spirit to take over from us. The young spirit is trained by the old, who then dies.
“You ask how many of us there are. Once there were many of us. I can remember when there was a water and earth spirit for every dale. But these past centuries, few new spirits are being born. Old spirits are dying and their territories are no longer guarded. Now there are just a handful of earth spirits still living in the dales. All the water spirits are gone. Some left, and those that chose to remain have been taken by the ice. Neither dead, nor reborn.”
Thwaite’s eyes dropped to the branch in his hands. He threw it onto the fire. The flames wrapped themselves around the rotten wood. Smoke streamed upwards.
“What happened?” asked Wyn.
In a tantrum of wind that shook the birch trees around them, Tawhir thumped down among the veronicas.
“Have you told her who she is yet?”
“I’m coming to that.”
“Any time you’re ready …”
Thwaite threw out a hand to grab the boy, but Tawhir was too quick, retreating into the branches of a silver birch. His eyes were fixed on Wyn. She felt herself flushing, but before she could say anything, Tawhir disappeared again. Thwaite continued his narrative as if nothing had happened.
“The spirits were created to protect and rein in their elements. But among us there have always been those who have sought to expand their territories. For the most part these conflicts were small. A fire spirit might fight with an earth spirit and run wild in his territory, or some tussle could take place in the sky between a water and a wind spirit. But occasionally things would get out of hand and groups of spirits would gather in great numbers to wage war with each other, destroying whole territories with earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, fire and ice.
“So once again, the earth intervened. To keep the peace and protect the balance of nature, the earth created two supreme spirits, giving each of them power over all the elements. They can control the oceans and summon earthquakes, hurricanes, fire and snow. These two beings can take any form they like, but in their true form they are what you humans call dragons.”
“Dragons!” exclaimed Wyn. “Real-life dragons! You’ve got to be joking! They’re myths, fairy tales!”
But as she spoke an image flashed through Wyn’s mind. She saw clouds rushing past her and the wide ocean curving away far below. S
he shook her head clear and was back in the cavern with Thwaite watching her.
“The two dragons are the earth’s champions. For thousands of years, they have kept the peace and helped nurture life on earth. They themselves are opposites. There is the ice dragon, Sh’en Shiekar. His power grows in the winter’s cold. And his partner is Mugasa, the fire dragon, whose strength lies in the heat of summer. Their great power is matched only by their secrecy. In all my years tending this dale, I’ve never caught sight of them, or known another spirit who has.”
“Why do they hide, if they’re so powerful?” said Wyn.
“They’re not untouchable,” said Thwaite. “For all their strength, they can be killed, and there have always been spirits who have resented being governed by the dragons. In recent times, that resentment has turned to anger and rebellion. It was the rise of humans that changed everything. The early humans knew of the spirits and worshipped them, but over time humans began to change the face of the world, causing great damage to nature. Many spirits turned their power against humans, but the dragons did not.
“A rebellion took shape. There were secret gatherings, alliances formed between spirits who once fought against each other. Their one goal was to find the dragons and kill them. Then, unfettered, the spirits would be free to turn their fury on humans. I don’t know how it happened, and I would never have believed that such a thing would have been possible, but somehow the rebels slipped through the defenses of Mugasa, the fire dragon, and killed her.
“It was an act as reckless as it was ill-conceived. They have put the earth in the greatest danger of all. Without Mugasa’s fire to balance Sh’en Shiekar’s ice, the world has grown colder and colder. Without a summer this year, the world will slip into an endless ice age and all living things will die.”
The earth spirit’s green eyes were fixed unblinking on her. Wyn began backing away from Thwaite, her stomach turning.
