‘I’m coming for you two tomorrow,’ he said, pointing a carrot at them across the table.
‘Gwait,’ said Ottilie, her mouth full of mashed potato.
‘Good luck,’ said Gully.
‘Oh I don’t need luck, Gulliver Colter,’ said Scoot, gesticulating wildly. ‘You’ll see.’ He sent the carrot flying across the room. ‘Oops.’
22
The Withering Wood
The final weeks of spring were the most exhausting and exhilarating of Ottilie’s life. She had never known there could be a good kind of tired. A kind of tired that didn’t come from hours of gathering kindling, picking fruit and half-carrying Freddie away from Gurt’s hollow. A kind of tired that didn’t come from hunger, or cold, or sleeping on the floor. This was the kind of tired that came from long days, working hard, eating well and sleeping soundly in a warm and comfortable bed.
Ottilie wasn’t in charge anymore. She felt so much younger than she ever had before. This made no sense, considering what they were doing, but Ottilie found that she wasn’t so worried – not the way she had been. Freddie had been lost to them for so many years that Ottilie had taken over her mother’s worrying. She had worried about Gully all day long. It was crippling.
It wouldn’t go away completely; Ottilie would always worry about him. That was what came of having an adventurous brother. But having all these people here – all these adults organising things, making sure they were fed, looking out for them – meant she could finally worry like a sister, not a parent. The Hunt was invested in their huntsmen. They looked after them properly. Ottilie had never been healthier, and she had never felt so free.
But not everyone felt the same.
‘I feel like a slave!’ moaned Scoot, flopping down on Ottilie’s bed and miming some strange action with his hands – it looked like he was pretending to tear off his head.
‘Scoot, you’re getting mud all over the place! Get off my bed,’ said Ottilie, shoving him off with her foot.
Scoot hit the floor with a thump. ‘That’s what happens when you’re stuck on your own two feet all day. If I got to snooze on the back of a wingerslink I’d be shiny and clean too.’
The door slid open and Gully tramped in, leaving a trail of mud behind him.
‘I’d like to see you have a go on a wingerslink, Scoot,’ said Ottilie. ‘Leo says they’re a good judge of character. Maestro would eat you the moment he saw you.’
Gully jumped onto her bed, landing flat on his back. Ottilie sighed. There was mud everywhere – mud, twigs, slimy leaves and splatters of miscellaneous dredretch gloop. She was used to mud. Growing up on the edge of a swamp was a mucky existence. A filth-free bed was all she asked, but she wouldn’t say anything more about it, not with Scoot in the room. Admitting to care about cleanliness, she had learned, was fairly uncommon among these boys, and Ottilie could not afford to stand out from the crowd. Preddy wouldn’t have rolled on her bed. He would have settled carefully on a chair, or hovered awkwardly in the centre of the room so as not to sully the furniture. Just for a moment, her whole body felt heavy. She wished Preddy had stayed with them.
‘Are you finished for today?’ she asked.
Gully grinned, his eyes half-closed. ‘All done. And tomorrow’s my day off.’
Tomorrow should have been Ottilie’s day off too, but she was terribly behind on her last four study tasks. She would have to spend the entire day with her nose in a dredretch bestiary.
‘Did you see Preddy’s moved up? He’s third now,’ said Scoot, narrowing his eyes.
‘I saw that,’ said Gully. ‘I wonder what order he’s with.’
‘Mounts, probably,’ said Scoot. ‘Voilies practically drooled on him when he said he could ride a horse.’
‘He got thirty points yesterday,’ said Gully. ‘Must have been a good day.’
‘A good day for Leo is a hundred and fifty points,’ said Ottilie, feeling a little proud. ‘If he’s on a hunt. Fifty if he’s on a patrol.’
‘I’ve never got thirty points in one day,’ said Gully, who had overtaken Ottilie in the rankings a week ago. ‘I’m still beating Preddy, though.’
Scoot groaned loudly. ‘Ugh, you’re coming second, Gully, aren’t you!’
Gully grinned. ‘Murphy Graves from Arko is still winning,’ he said.
‘Well, not for long!’ said Scoot.
‘You keep saying that, but when I checked you were seventeenth,’ said Ottilie.
‘Yeah well,’ said Scoot, ‘… not for long.’
When the bells chimed, signalling half an hour until dinner was served, Scoot and Gully hurried back to their own bedchambers to wash and change into their daywear uniforms.
Ottilie snuck in some reading before dinner. Her most overdue study task was a series of relatively simple questions about jivvies. She had almost finished the relevant chapters; some of the information would have been very helpful three weeks ago during the fledgling trials. For instance, she now knew that the only scent jivvies could sense was freshly spilled human blood. That single sense was so heightened they could smell it ten miles away, and the scent drove them mad. They would work themselves into such a frenzy that they sometimes killed each other in pursuit. This, the bestiary said, was one of the very few circumstances in which a dredretch would turn on one of its own kind.
By the time the seventh bell rang, Ottilie was starving. She hastened down to the dining room to find Gully sitting at a table with Ned. Her plate nearly overflowing, she practically skipped across the room and slid into a chair opposite Gully.
‘Hello,’ she said quickly, before tearing into a cob of corn like Hero ripping meat from the bone.
‘Evening Ott,’ said Ned. ‘Good work with those stingers this morning. Gully and I saw from the hill.’
‘Thanks,’ said Ottilie, chomping down on six or seven green beans at once.
Leo had shown Ottilie the best way to fell stingers with a cutlass. Like horrible green flying eels, stingers moved through the air as if it were water. Covered in needle-sharp barbs, they had an excruciating sting, and would often try to wrap themselves around a limb or an exposed neck, attempting to incapacitate the huntsman and giving the stinger the opportunity to go for the heart. Like yickers, they were low flyers, unable to fly higher than the boundary walls.
They tended to stick to the wetlands and Ottilie and Leo happened across the swarm in a marshy field of krippygrass. Leo had noted that, like many of the groups of dredretches they encountered, they were greater in number than the previous year – a fact Ottilie found deeply disturbing.
As if summoned by her thoughts, Leo appeared in the doorway. He was still in his hunting gear, though their shift had ended hours ago. What had he been doing – training? He was fanatical. Didn’t he ever rest?
‘Why are we sitting with the fledges, Ned?’ said Leo with an exasperated sigh.
‘You can sit wherever you want, Leonard,’ said Ned. ‘Look, there’s a spot over there by Igor Thrike.’
Leo looked distastefully at Igor and plonked himself down next to Ottilie. ‘You know he’s second now, don’t you, Ott?’ he said, swiping a carrot from her plate and pointing it at Gully.
‘Yes. I know,’ said Ottilie, resisting the urge to say that if he’d stop hogging all the shots she might have a better chance of keeping up.
‘I don’t know what things are like in the Swamp Hollows,’ said Leo, chomping loudly into her carrot, ‘but where I’m from the older brother usually wins. How does it feel being beaten by your little brother?’
‘Maybe Gully’s just got a superior guardian showing him the ropes,’ said Ned, a twinkle in his dark eyes.
‘Ha! We both know that’s not the case, Ned.’
Ned speared a potato with his fork and grinned.
‘Look, in all seriousness, Ott,’ said Leo, ‘you can let your little brother beat you if you want, it’s no skin off my nose. But if you let Igor Thrike’s fledge overtake you, I’ll feed you to a giffersnak.’
/> Ottilie didn’t know what a giffersnak was, but she had a horrible feeling Leo was deadly serious, and made a mental note to keep an eye on Dimitri Vosvolder’s scores from then on.
Maeve Moth moved to the table next to theirs and began clearing empty plates, and Ottilie caught Maeve looking at her more than once. She found it very unsettling. Maeve seemed too interested in her, as if she knew Ottilie was out of place. Just when she was beginning to feel comfortable, Ottilie was reminded that she did not belong.
‘Why don’t any of those girls hunt?’ said Gully, gesturing at Maeve.
Ottilie choked loudly on a bit of carrot.
‘Ha! You’re not serious?’ said Leo.
Ottilie was still choking. Leo thumped her on the back and she spat out a large orange chunk. She was very red in the face, and hoped they would attribute that to the choking, rather than the topic of conversation.
‘I am,’ said Gully. ‘Why? No-one’s said anything about it that makes sense.’
Ottilie stiffened. How many people had he asked?
‘Girls can’t hunt. They’re too soft. They’re not clever enough and they’d be too scared –’
‘You don’t really think that, Leo,’ said Ned, glancing at Maeve, who was quite obviously listening to their conversation.
‘I do –’
‘All these custodians are here because they applied for that job,’ Ned interrupted. ‘They don’t pick girls for the Hunt because it’s not the sort of work they let girls do in the Usklers, or anywhere that I know about. It’s the way things have always been, but –’
‘Why are we talking about this?’ demanded Leo.
Ottilie felt herself shrink in her chair.
‘I was just wondering,’ said Gully, innocently.
Under the table Ottilie kicked him in the shin.
Just as she feared, Ottilie’s entire day off was consumed by her last three study tasks. She knew if she could just focus a little better on what she was doing, she might have done them in half the time. But she was distracted. Their conversation over dinner the night before had reminded her how unwelcome she was in Fort Fiory, and how dangerous it was to stay. She couldn’t help but worry that she had chosen the wrong path. Now, the day was gone, her back ached, her vision was going fuzzy, and she felt stubbornly, irrepressibly grumpy.
It was this sullen mood that triggered an odd thought. There was something funny about what she had been reading. She couldn’t be sure, but Ottilie didn’t think she had come across a single mention of the fact that only a child, an innocent, could kill a dredretch.
She had seen the shepherds kill those yickers. Were animals discounted from the rule? Or were they simply considered innocent at any age? Shrugging inwardly, she shook it off. It couldn’t be a lie. What would be the point? Why would the king order children to be sent to do the work of a proper soldier?
As if seeking the answer to her questions, Ottilie flipped through the pages of the volume in front of her.
‘What … ?’ she muttered.
The page she had landed on, page 472, was blackened in the centre. It almost looked burnt, but there was a smoothness to the damage, like spilled candlewax. Ottilie ran her fingers over it, which sent an unpleasant tingle up her arm. Dredretch. Dredretch blood, or some other foul fluid, had burned a hole in the page – perhaps it was a smear from the previous reader’s sleeve.
She flicked back through the pages to find the chapter title. Wyler Venom: A Slow Death. Of course it was precisely the chapter she needed to read. Ottilie sighed and snapped the book closed. She would have to get a different copy from the library.
Ottilie descended a narrow stone staircase. She had never had access to books before, apart from Our Walkable World of course, which she had read ten times over, maybe more. They were such rare and expensive things. It was bizarre to see piles of them gathering dust on the shelves.
The library itself brought to mind an abandoned beehive. Made up of arched tunnels lined with identical volumes, the space was difficult to navigate and it wasn’t long until Ottilie was completely lost.
The air seemed to thicken around her, and Ottilie felt the colour rising in her cheeks. She was sure she could hear her own heart beating in the silence – a silence that was broken by a high-pitched sneeze.
Ottilie jumped and stumbled backwards into the stacks. ‘Who’s there?’ she demanded.
No-one answered.
She gathered herself, pulled a lantern from the hook behind her, and held it aloft to light the darkest reaches of the aisle. Sitting on the floor was a girl with a blue handkerchief pressed to her face and a look of alarm in her wide, dark eyes.
‘Hello,’ said Ottilie.
The girl sighed in relief, the blue cloth fluttering with her breath. ‘Hello,’ she mumbled from behind it. ‘Sorry,’ she lowered the handkerchief, revealing a long nose, ‘the dust makes me sneeze.’
‘Um, no problem … I’m Ott.’ It was all she could of think to say.
‘Alba.’
‘Nice to meet you. Do you look after the library?’
Alba shook her head, her two braids swaying with the movement. ‘I’m from the kitchens. I just like it down here.’
Ottilie noted the tower of books between Alba’s outstretched legs.
‘I’m not really supposed to be here. My mother will be mad.’
‘Your mum lives here too?’ Ottilie was surprised. It was the first she had heard of a real family in Fort Fiory.
‘She’s one of the cooks. Are you looking for something? I know this place back to front.’
‘I’m trying to find – actually …’ Here was someone she could ask! If Alba knew the library well, she might have come across something about the rule of innocence. ‘Do you know, I’ve noticed something strange –’
‘The age of the books?’ Alba’s voice pitched higher and faster. This was clearly something she had been eager to discuss for a while.
‘No, what about it?’
‘None of the books are more than thirty years old. There are a couple discussing the old legends about dredretches, but the rest, all the books you boys study – no more than three decades old. I don’t know why, but I think that’s strange.’
Ottilie supposed it was strange. ‘We can’t have been hunting dredretches very long, then.’
‘No. That’s what I thought,’ said Alba eagerly.
‘Have you read a lot of these books, Alba?’
‘Almost all, I think. There really aren’t very many.’
‘Have you ever read about the rule of innocence?’
‘I –’
‘ALBA KIT!’
Alba scrambled to her feet. Knocking the pile of books to the ground, she tripped over one with a particularly fat spine. Ottilie managed to grab her just before she fell on her face.
Alba straightened up. ‘I’m here, Mum,’ she said, too quietly for her mother to hear.
It didn’t seem to matter – in mere seconds Alba’s mother appeared at the end of the aisle. Ottilie recognised her. It was the woman with the strange face she had seen in the dining room before her first patrol.
‘Alba, I gave you one hour to read. It’s been three and a half! I’m up to my ears in dishes – who is this?’
‘I’m Ott,’ she blurted, her face reddening.
‘Ott? You’re a huntsman?’
‘I … yes.’
Ottilie wondered for a moment if Alba’s mother was worried about her daughter being alone with a huntsman in the dimly lit stacks. The woman moved towards them and Ottilie saw her eyes narrow and then soften to wide, dark pools like her daughter’s.
‘It’s nice to meet you Ott, I’m Montie.’
Montie Kit wore a brightly coloured scarf wrapped around what Ottilie assumed was a shaved head. Creeping down from beneath the scarf was a vicious burn. The scarring spread across half her face, pulling her left eye and the edge of her mouth downward. Her long nose, and the right side of her face, were untouched. Ottilie’s eyes
flicked up and down. She tried not to stare.
‘Come on Alba, kitchen – now. Ott, you should head up to dinner. They’ll be clearing it soon.’
‘I can’t. I’ve got a study task to finish.’
‘Come with us then. I’ll give you something you can take back to your room.’
‘I – thank you.’ Ottilie felt strange, as if she had just been hugged. ‘I just have to find a book.’
Montie sighed and said, ‘Tell Alba the title. She’ll sniff it out faster than you or I could manage.’ Her face was unmoved, but even in the dim lantern light Ottilie could read the smile in her uneven eyes.
The next day, their dawn patrol took them further west than Ottilie had ever gone. Flyers were often assigned patrol regions furthest from the station because they had the quickest mode of transport. Leo said he was glad they’d been given that route, because he wanted to show her something important. He wouldn’t tell her what it was, but she gathered from the grim set of his jaw that it was nothing good. What good was there in this place – this strange place overrun by dredretches, where even books didn’t have the answers to all her questions? For the first time since she’d decided to stay, Ottilie was seriously considering changing her mind.
But as they swept along with the breeze, Ottilie’s thoughts digressed. She wondered how many dredretches were lying in wait, and how many points they might earn before their shift was through. ‘Is the scoring really fair?’ said Ottilie.
‘What do you mean?’
‘With the different orders. Surely one order is better than the others?’
‘Flyers are the best, Ott. I told you that,’ he said, his tone unapologetically smug.
‘That’s not what I mean.’ She smiled all the same. Flyers were the best. ‘I mean better with numbers – scoring points. We can cover so much more ground than the footmen, so can mounts, and we’ve got Maestro to help when dredretches attack.’
Maestro tilted and soared to the north. Leo and Ottilie braced and leaned with the movement.
Once Maestro slowed, Leo answered, ‘It works out. Flyers can get into the Red Canyon, where no-one else can, but we’re pretty useless in dense forest. And sure, we come up here and hunt all the winged types, but footmen and mounts can still shoot them down from below. That’s the thing about a dredretch, they attack wherever you are. A flying dredretch is just as likely to go for a footman on the ground as a flyer in the air. Plus, footmen can go after all the smaller kinds hiding in the scrub and mounts can give chase through the trees, which we can’t, unless they’re wide enough apart.’
Ottilie Colter and the Narroway Hunt Page 15
