Aurora

by Julie Bertagna

  ‘Not stop Lily,’ says Wing, stroking Mara’s hair. ‘Lily is like Mara. Wing try keep her safe.’ His head droops. ‘My wolf save me – see?’

  He shows Mara the arrow lodged in the dead wolf’s head and the small red wound on the hairline of his brow. Crashing into seawater has reopened the wound and blood is trickling through his hair and down his neck. Mara takes the cloth foodwrap from her bag to bandage him up.

  ‘My wolf take arrow – bang!’ Wing explains. He points to his head. ‘I dizzy, fall in sea. I see hunters take Lily.’

  ‘Oh no.’ The fear that has swirled inside Mara ever since Lily disappeared now takes the shape of the vicious hunters who once captured her in Ilira. ‘Is she – Wing, please tell me she’s—’

  ‘Wing watch.’ He pulls his telescope from his belt. ‘Wing see.’ He points with it to the glimmering palace on its islet in the fjord. ‘Lily there.’ Now he touches his head. ‘Head sick from arrow. Wing lie on rocks long time then swim for Lily – men chase me. We go find Lily now!’ he finishes, shaking with emotion.

  Relief sweeps through Mara.

  Lily is alive. That’s all that matters. She is not lost, far across the ocean.

  ‘That’s Tuck’s palace,’ she tells Wing. ‘Yes,’ she says to the astonished wolf boy, ‘Tuck is alive. They call him the Pontifix. He changed this city and they talk as if he owns it – and half of the Arctic seas.’ Her eyes harden. ‘But he doesn’t own my daughter.’

  ‘Guards, Wing warns. ‘All round palace.’

  Anything is possible, Mara tells herself. Tuck survived a mountain landslide. Fox found a way through to her, sending his voice across oceans and time. There is always a way.

  Hurrying back to the kayaks, she begins to heave one of the narrow boats across the harbour rocks towards the sea.

  WEAVE WEAPONS AND DREAMS

  Lily clicks open the globe. Clumsy with tiredness, her trembling hands no longer feel as if they are her own. They belong to Tuck, who controls what used to be her life.

  Here in her prison in the belly of Tuck’s ship, the chain around her feet lets her walk no further than a water pot or slop bucket or the rough sealskin that is her bed. She is only unchained to work. She must sleep when Tuck says so, and she does; it’s her only escape.

  Still, his voice reaches into her dreams.

  Go, search, find . . . Tell me . . . what do you see?

  Tuck sits across from her at the long table where he has assembled a collection of sea-battered relics. Mysteries for her to solve. What was this in the old world? What was its power? What did this do? But rummaging for answers in the ruins of an unreal world is like searching for a single needle on a pine forest floor.

  His breath is hot and hungry. His face is too close. Lily slips on the halo, avoiding his parched eyes.

  Day and night he preys on her, peering as she scribbles in the globe. But her fingers are too fast and furtive for his weak eyes. The Weave spell is the only thing she still owns in the world, except her thoughts. She will not surrender either to Tuck.

  Her head is heavy as a rock. She has no idea if it’s day or night. Time has mulched into one long dimness here in the depths of the ship, as it did in her winter burrow, except there she belonged to herself.

  Lily snatches at memories as her old life begins to feel distant, unreal.

  Midsummer nights, when the sun moves like a halo around the top of the world, swimming far out on the lake with Wing.

  Warm sleepy heaps of little Corey and Coll snuggled up beside her at the sundown fire.

  The mournful bellow of reindeer at summer’s end, the saddest sound in the world.

  ‘Weapons,’ Tuck reminds her.

  He wants to know about the weapons of the old world. Weapons are harpoons, knives, spears, arrows, sometimes teeth and fists – but Tuck wants to know about bolts of light that will melt a man and shells full of death that raze cities to dust. Lily must ransack the Weave for lost knowledge of the drowned world that will give Tuck a deadly new power in this one.

  ‘Go,’ he orders her.

  And once again she dives . . .

  . . . into the Weave, hurtling down the boulevards, senses on alert, pretending to do Tuck’s bidding – but intent on her own desperate quest.

  She keeps a wary lookout for Pandora, but the venomous snake-girl has never appeared again. The only presences have been the weird scuttling creatures of the junk heaps. Lily begins her work, foraging among the sparking ruins, then halts, sensing movement deep within the boulevards. She slips into the shadows and spies a procession of whispering creatures pass between the crumbling Weave towers.

  Whatever they are, whatever they’re doing, they’re her only hope.

  The procession moves down through the boulevards between ranks of towerstacks at various stages of collapse. Lily follows at a wary distance and watches the creatures enter a dark alleyway. Once the boulevard is empty, she creeps up to the alleyway and sees a bolted door beside a pulsing blue sign. Is this where the whispering creatures went?

  DREAM the pulsing sign commands.

  An unlit S droops upside down at the end of the word. Lily turns the hanging curve of the S the right way up and it clicks satisfyingly into place.

  The bolts slam back. The door springs open.

  Lily stares in surprise. So that was the key to open the door?

  She steps through the door into a dark passageway. It leads into a hidden wasteland fortressed by the walls of the crumbling towers. The whispers are now an industrious hum – like bees in summer, thinks Lily, clambering over fizzling heaps of rubble towards the huge crowd in the wasteland.

  She creeps closer, heart thudding, unable to believe her eyes.

  The Weave creatures are gathered around the snake-girl and – and –

  A fox!

  A fox with vivid eyes and a flame-bright coat.

  Noise erupts overhead. Lily glances at the electronic sky. Does the Weave have storms? But the ether is dark and calm, apart from shooting stars of decay.

  ‘Commander Tuck!’ bellows a voice.

  BY TURN OF THE TIDE

  The bellow comes from Tuck’s ship, a universe away from the Weave.

  In realworld, someone pushes past Lily so roughly that the globe slips from her fingers and the halo jolts from her eyes. She clasps her head in confusion, lurching between worlds. The Weave connection flickers.

  No!

  Lily resettles the halo but the Weave world is fading. Her desperate scream flies across the cyberwastes. The heads of the Weave creatures turn, ether lights sparkling in their eyes. For an instant the fox’s vivid gaze looks up as she whirls away, yanked across the ruined boulevards into seas of static, ripped out of the Weave.

  The connection cuts dead.

  Lily crashes back into Tuck’s ship. Devastated, she pulls the halo from her eyes. She can’t find the globe. The figure that is Tuck seems phantom-like in the dim lanterns of the ship’s hold. The thunder is the pounding of feet on the deck overhead.

  Tuck has the globe in his hand.

  ‘I need it back,’ Lily gasps. ‘I was onto something. Please!’

  ‘Shh!’ Tuck hisses, the sound as harsh as a lash.

  A crescent moon looms out of the cavernous dark of the ship’s belly. Lily rubs her eyes, then sees it’s the silver emblem on the helmet of the Pontifix’s personal guard, Genk. Sweat drips from the brow of the lumbering man and splashes on the tabletop.

  ‘Emergency, Commander Tuck,’ gasps Genk. ‘Alert by sea hawk from the west-coast lookouts. A Vulture fleet’s gatherin’ at Atlan Point.’

  The globe drops from Tuck’s hand. It rolls across the rough timber table and settles in a groove.

  ‘The Vulture?’ At Atlan?’ Tuck rakes a pale strand of hair from his stricken face. ‘My tracker ship said he headed Far North with the first sun.’ A wan smile creases his face. ‘Aha. So he’s fooled me. How many ships?’ he demands, the smile dead on his lips.

  ‘Twenty by sundown,�
� the guard replies. ‘We can sort that, but – but –’ The guard braces himself against the brittle expression on his master’s face. ‘There’s more on the way.’

  ‘More?’

  Genk looks as if he is trying to spit out unsavoury words, but swallows them instead.

  Tuck slams his fist on the table, so hard he dislodges the globe from its groove. It rolls slowly across the wood, stopping short of Lily’s reach. Dare she grab it?

  ‘Bring my Skua fleet in from the deep oceans,’ says Tuck in a quiet, deadly tone. ‘All my best war ships. Fix it, Genk.’

  ‘The – the Skua fleet?’

  Tuck draws his cutlass. The curved blade flashes in the lantern light.

  Genk stares. ‘Eh, the thing is, Commander Tuck, messenger hawks say the Skuas just joined the Vulture’s fleets. Alongside Rodenglaw’s.’

  Tuck laughs. ‘Rodenglaw’s ships just joined ours.’

  ‘Eh, they did. An’ then they, eh, didn’t. The Vulture made ’em think again.’

  Tuck slices the blade of the cutlass into the tabletop. Whether by luck or design, he just misses cutting off the tip of Genk’s large nose.

  ‘I want,’ says Tuck, in a murderous tone, ‘an attack fleet at Atlan Point. By sunrise.’

  ‘Sunrise?’

  ‘Don’t lose your head, Genk.’ The cutlass is resheathed in the broad leather belt of Tuck’s windwrap. ‘Just get it done.’

  Genk hurries away and thuds up the stairs to the deck.

  ‘You,’ Tuck turns to Lily, ‘must do the impossible too. I need more from you. Now! The lives of your friends depend on it – your own too.’

  ‘My friends?’

  Lily turns cold inside.

  ‘There’s a cave under the palace kitchens where the sea takes away waste,’ says Tuck. He puts his mouth so close to her ear that his voice seems to be inside her head. ‘The morning tide will take the woman and her son. So race against the tide if you want to save them.’

  Lily panics. ‘It’s all dead stuff – junk. I can’t find what you want.’

  ‘Somewhere in that junk are the secrets of weapons that no one in this world can match.’

  ‘Surely the sky people will match anything,’ Lily murmurs.

  ‘The sky people are in their world, not in mine,’ says Tuck.

  ‘They are in your skies,’ Lily dares.

  ‘Just get me what I need,’ Tuck commands, and Lily reads the chilling desperate in his handsome face. ‘By sunrise.’

  A man’s scream on the deck overhead makes them both jump.

  Tuck is on his feet. In seven measured strides he finds his way to the stairs that lead up to the deck. Then he is gone.

  Leaving Lily unchained and . . . alone?

  She looks around.

  Where’s the guard?

  There’s always a guard. Lily lifts the lantern and swings the light around the innards of the ship.

  No guard. No chains.

  It’s her chance to escape.

  But she must get straight back into the Weave or she might never find the fox again – the fox that might be him.

  One chance to escape.

  One chance to find her father.

  One chance to save the lives of Broom and Clay.

  Lily grasps the globe. The smooth sphere tingles at her touch. Something violent and ugly is happening on the deck overhead. The blood-curdling cries make her shudder. She looks at the stairs that lead up to – who knows what? Freedom? Death?

  Whatever she chooses is a deadly risk.

  Lily closes her eyes, decides, and takes her chance.

  CRESCENT AND CLAW

  The sea is full of urgent whispers. A green flare of aurora crackles in the sky. The moon is sharp as a cutlass: a Culpy crescent, Tuck’s emblem, hanging above the palace as if by his command. Mara digs her paddle into a wave and the kayak cuts across the water, under the bridges.

  Her thoughts speed with the boat. Oreon is on a deadly mission of the Vulture’s, she is sure. Why else has he gone to the palace with the lethal lightning-bolt weapon she saw on the harbour?

  Wing, crammed in close behind her, yells in her ear as a rock juts from the water like a shark fin. They steer frantically with the oars but all Mara can think of is Lily, in the very place that Oreon and his lightning gun have gone – and the watch that carries Fox’s voice.

  She will swim to the palace if she must.

  Cleverly, Oreon cast his news among the fisherfolk – the gossiping hub of every port. His news would have been lost among the muddle-headed drunks in Ale Alley; by sunup, the threat of the sky invasion will have spread all through the boats and bridge market of Ilira. Why, people will whisper, has the Pontifix allowed another empire to sink its claws into the North? In a few, sly words Oreon has destabilized Tuck in his own city. And by sunrise, what else will Oreon have done?

  Mara scans the darkness. No sign of the gondola fleet. They must have landed on the palace isle.

  Wing pulls his wolf head over his eyes as they clear the last of the bridges. The round dome of the palace glows like a fallen chunk of moon set in a claw of rock. As they draw towards the small island, Mara sees the tall-masted sailing ship docked on the far side.

  A bitter mist blows in, stinging her eyes, catching her throat. Over her shoulder, Wing’s wolf snout seems to sniff the air and the beast’s dead amber eyes flicker with an ominous glow.

  ‘Fire!’ says Wing. He points his paddle. ‘Ship!’

  Flames lick the lowest sails of Tuck’s ship. The eye-stinging mist is smoke.

  They push forward until the kayak bumps against rock. Mara clambers ashore, Wing at her heels.

  Now Mara sees the gondola fleet, positioned all around the ship. Guards in the boats fling up ropes on spiked anchors that catch on the ship’s rails. Spider-fast, they climb the ropes and invade the deck, whipping up fires in the rig-ropes and mast sails. Screams rip through the blaze.

  ‘Great Skua!’ she whispers, reading the flame-lit name of Tuck’s ship; the name of the pirate bird of the Northern seas.

  Bullet-shaped longboats have invaded the fjord, steering carefully around jutting rocks and ship-wrecking traps. In the time it takes Mara and Wing to scramble around the palace isle, the invaders have begun spilling from the longboats and on to the rough harbour.

  Mara looks out to sea and her heart jolts. There, at the mouth of the fjord, moonlight falls on what seems, to her startled eyes, to be a cluster of silver pines in the wind. She blinks and the swaying treetops become the tall masts of ships.

  So Oreon did not come to Ilira alone.

  But Tuck’s fate is his own problem. Lily is all Mara can think of now.

  Fire threads the masts of Tuck’s ship and Mara is consumed by a panic so fierce she doesn’t know which way to run. Where is Lily? The palace, surely? Not the ship?

  Smoke stings her eyes. Mara scrubs them with her sleeve and sees Oreon standing imperiously on the rocks of the rough harbour, watching as a man is marched along the deck of the ship. The man’s hair is like a dash of moonlight against his dark windwrap. Mara knows she is looking at Tuck.

  She slips on seaweed and crashes to the ground. Pain shoots through her but she ignores it, barely able to believe that the man she thought long dead is still alive; the one who stole her connection to Fox.

  Mara creeps across the rocks. She must tread carefully now. Too much is at stake. Thinking fast, she sees Tuck forced down the ship’s ladder and into a gondola. By the time she has crept as close as she dares, he has been brought ashore to Oreon.

  ‘Let him go,’ he orders the guards. ‘My brother is not your enemy, Tuck. Neither am I.’

  ‘Your brother can’t be trusted,’ Tuck replies. ‘Not by me.’

  ‘He says the same of you,’ Oreon retorts. ‘But you’re not bickering gypsea boys any more; you are both the powers of the North, and the North is under threat. War is coming. A great new enemy faces us all. We need to band together as gypsea brothers. You’re still a gypsea
, Tuck,’ he urges, earnest now. ‘We need to forget our differences, remember our bonds and fight the real war. We’ve made contact with the Surgents—’

  ‘This,’ Tuck interrupts, gesturing to his burning ship, ‘is your idea of bonding?’

  ‘It’s our way of making sure you see the seriousness of the situation,’ says Oreon. ‘Your ship is burning, your guards have abandoned you.’ He stoops and picks a guard’s helmet from the ground and presents it to Tuck. ‘See? Now your men wear the Vulture’s claw.’

  ‘I see that your brother hasn’t changed,’ says Tuck, brittle-eyed. ‘I see plenty.’

  Mara recalls the short-sighted gypsea boy with his eyebox and knows that beneath the fierce composure of the man is the same boy who grasped whatever he could of the world, trying to own and absorb what he struggled to see.

  ‘Never trust a gypsea, eh?’ Oreon gives Tuck a wry smile. ‘My brother knew that, Tuck, so he made a secret pledge with Rodenglaw and his commanders that they would ally to our Vulture fleets if anything happened to him, once you married his daughter. Now they are all in the Vulture’s grasp.’

  ‘So your brother took Rodenglaw’s pledge – then had him killed? To get his hands on his fleets?’

  Oreon nods.

  ‘Urth!’ Tuck curses and gives a harsh laugh. ‘Rodenglaw was a fool.’

  ‘He was,’ Oreon agrees. ‘But his men are ours now and your fleets have scuttled to join us too, like rats from a sinking ship. The Vulture is ready to claim his place as Emperor of the North. He’s ready to lead the fight against the sky empire alongside the Surgents. But he asks you to join him as a gypsea brother. You know things that we don’t. You have knowledge and talents that we need – look at the wonder you’ve made of Ilira. Join us, Tuck!’ Oreon pauses. ‘What choice do you have?’

  Tuck responds like a true gypsea. He draws the cutlass from his belt and lunges towards Oreon. Guards surge forward as the young scholar pulls his lightning gun from his windwrap. Mara sees what she must stop.