by Lari Don
“I’m sure I can.” Jasper trotted towards Thomas, all his doubts gone now he was being useful.
Pearl counted as the boys brought out twenty-one bowls and arranged them in a circle round the throne.
Then Thomas fetched a bundle of kindling from a heap under the chimney. He twisted handfuls of wood slivers into bonfire shapes, and laid one in each bowl.
Emmie and Jasper watched him, fascinated. Ruby stood nearby, looking occasionally at the locked door. Pearl kept out of the way, hoping for a moment when she could intervene.
Soon Thomas had built pyramids of kindling in every bowl. “Shall I light the fires now, my lord, or wait until you’re seated?”
“Light them now, my boy, light them now.” The Earl beamed at his grandson then turned to the triplets. “Thomas is just lighting a few fires for us: fires to give light so we can see what we’re doing, and warmth so you little dears don’t get cold while you sing me a song. Shall we see if you can link your hands round the bottom of this throne?”
Before Pearl could move, the Earl shoved the triplets round the base of the rock chair and ordered them to hold hands in a circle. They had to stretch their arms as far as they would go to reach all the way round, then the Earl checked that each handclasp was firm.
“Well done, well done. It would have been easier in a couple of years when your arms were longer, but as the Laird tried to steal you today, we just had to move everything forward.
“Ready, Thomas?”
“Just a couple more, Grandfather.”
Pearl watched as Thomas used a torch to light the small fires in a wide circle round the triplets, who were in a tight circle round the base of the pillar.
The Earl eased Jasper and Ruby’s hands apart so he could step onto the stone carving, and barked an order to close the circle again. He didn’t climb up, he just stopped and waited on the lowest carved foothold.
Pearl saw Emmie whisper quickly to her brother and sister. Pearl was sure that neither Thomas, with his attention on the fires, nor the Earl, balancing on the carved stone, noticed that when Jasper and Ruby closed the circle again, they held each other by their sleeves not their hands.
Then all the fires were lit. And suddenly it began.
Chapter 28
The Earl ascended the throne, climbing with slow steps that looked regal but were probably an attempt not to slip on the narrow footholds.
Once he had sat down and thumped his huge hands on his wide thighs, he called to the circle of triplets at his feet, “Sing me a crown! Sing me a link to these mountains!”
He closed his eyes.
Pearl stood against the wall, not sure, even after a day of seeing music move mountains, what harm this request for a song could do to the triplets.
Thomas sang a note, and Jasper repeated it. Then Thomas sang a phrase, and Emmie and Ruby copied it. Thomas moved away, as the triplets picked up the music for themselves and started creating their own harmonies and lyrics. Pearl still couldn’t grasp the words, couldn’t even remember them from one moment to the next, but she got a sense of heat and forging and metal and jewels and swirling endless circles. As he listened, the Earl’s face glowed with victory and pride.
Pearl, watching from outside the ring of burning bowls, saw that when the melody moved round the circle of singers, the bowls, balanced on their bases on the stone floor, started to spin. As the song speeded up, the bowls spun faster.
The base of each fire was being pulled round in a circle as the bowl turned, while the length of the flames tried to burn straight upwards. So the flames were twisting and whirling around each other, making patterns like plaits of hair or tartan ribbons.
As the bowls spun even faster, the flames were flung higher, swirling into pillars of fire. At the tip of each pillar, little sparks and flames were torn off to burn in the air.
Pearl stared at the fires, sure she should be coming up with a plan, taking some action. But watching the flames dance and feeling the tiredness in her legs and back, she slid down to sit against the wall. Perhaps the right moment would come soon.
The song grew in intensity and volume. Emmie was leading, Jasper and Ruby’s voices dancing round her.
The Earl demanded, “Sing a crown of fire to celebrate my power! Sing a crown of jewels to link me to these rocks! The flame crown will only burn tonight, but so long as you three stones stand here in a circle of song, the crown and the power will be mine for ever. Forever!”
“Forever?” Pearl repeated in a whisper. The triplets had to stay here forever?
“Forever?” she asked more loudly.
She pulled her gaze away from the flames, dragged herself up the wall and staggered out from the shadows.
“Forever?” she shouted over the sound of the music and the roaring of the fires.
“Of course, forever,” bellowed the Earl, his eyes still closed. “For us to control the mountains, they must be a crown for ever. Destiny is always for ever!”
Emmie, Ruby and Jasper were still singing, eyes closed, mouths wide. They didn’t seem to be listening to anything except each other, flinging notes back and forward.
“Forever!” Pearl turned to Thomas, who was leaning against the opposite wall, staff held loosely in his left hand.
“Did you know you were bringing them here forever?”
He met her eyes steadily. He nodded.
Pearl needed to be sure. “All day, you knew they would be trapped here forever?”
“It was necessary. It’s their destiny.”
“It wouldn’t have been their destiny if you’d said no, if you’d refused to hunt them down.”
“It is their destiny to be here,” Thomas insisted.
“It won’t be their destiny if they stop singing right now.”
“They can’t stop. It’s too late …”
He gestured upwards.
The tips of the flames, ripped off by the fires’ twisting, were being drawn into the centre of the circle, joining together above the Earl’s head, creating a jagged and flickering crown of fire.
Pearl guessed when that crown settled on the Earl’s head, the ceremony would be complete, and the triplets would be trapped here forever.
She swung round to step between the fires, and pull their hands apart. But Thomas stood in front of her, swinging his staff as he had done that morning at the gate, blocking her way.
“No! Let me past!”
She dodged left, but he was quicker than she was, with a longer reach. He laughed as she dodged right, then left again. His arm and the stick were always there before her. Pearl was trapped on the other side of the fires as her family sung themselves into a crown forever.
Suddenly, in one beat, in one note, the song changed. With a discordant shriek, Emmie stopped the fires’ motion dead. She leapt high into the air, flying right through the crown, kicking the points of flame apart, dragging Ruby and Jasper with her.
The children couldn’t let go of each other’s hands, but the weak bond at Ruby and Jasper’s sleeves ripped apart. Now Emmie sang not of fires and circles, but of flying. Her notes swung higher and higher, passing her power and skill to her brother and sister, so they weren’t dangling from her hands but floating and swooping with her.
The Earl yelled in anger and drew his horn from his jacket.
Thomas turned his back on Pearl and rushed to the base of the throne.
Emmie, Ruby and Jasper stopped singing. There was silence, apart from the hissing of flame and the whistle of breath.
The two Horsburghs stared at the three children bobbing above them in a line.
Emmie laughed down at them. “Thanks for the power you let me gather when we did the Laird’s gardening. Had you forgotten I could do that, Thomas, or did my sweet smiles and stupid questions make you think I was your servant already?”
Thomas shook his head. “You can do your flying circus tricks with a small handful of power, Emerald, but you can’t protect yourself from the force of our lorefasts. You certainly
can’t protect Ruby and Jasper.”
The Earl put the bull’s horn to his lips, aiming its dark oval at Jasper. Thomas pointed the staff at Ruby.
“Come down now, and we’ll just go back to the start.” Thomas’s voice was as gentle as his gesture was threatening. “Come down now, and no one will get hurt.”
“No. We won’t.” Emmie spoke softly, but everyone heard her. “We don’t want to be your tools. Let us all go now, and neither of you will get hurt.”
The Earl laughed, clambering down the throne to join Thomas at its base. “How could you hurt us?”
“Because I found the keystone. Because I stored the music of the mountains. Because I already have a lorefast of my own.”
Pearl understood before anyone else. She thrust her hands in her pockets and threw handkerchiefs and pencils and string and ribbons on the floor. Did she still have it? Or had it been lost on the journey, during the rocking horse ride to the castle or the swans’ attack on the ballroom or the balancing act on the rippling grass?
“I have a lorefast of my own,” Emmie repeated. “Pearl? The flint, please.”
As Pearl found the arrowhead in the last pocket, Emmie sang a high sharp note to rip her hands from her siblings’ grasp, then shouted, “Throw it to me!”
But Thomas had understood too; he was already standing in front of Pearl. Before she could lift her hand to throw the flint, he grabbed her wrist.
“Drop it,” he ordered.
The Earl blew his horn straight at Jasper, flinging the boy across the hall, crushing him against the wall, dropping him to the floor.
“Thomas!” Pearl pleaded.
The Earl blew his horn again, as Emmie and Ruby flew in circles above him, trying to avoid the ringing blasts.
“The flint!” yelled Emmie.
The Earl was whirling on the spot, his broad face red and shiny. “If you won’t crown me, changeling, then you won’t get out of here alive!” He blew again and again.
Thomas ignored the noise behind him and gripped Pearl harder.
“Let go of me,” said Pearl, making a heart-bursting effort to stay calm.
Thomas shook his head.
“Look at Jasper!”
They both looked at the crumpled boy on the floor. They both looked back at the flint in her hand.
“Thomas. Let go of my wrist.”
“No. This is my destiny.”
Ruby screamed, as the Earl’s echoing notes smashed her against the rafters. Thomas and Pearl looked up. Ruby fell out of the air, but Emmie caught her and started dodging about the roof space with her sister clutched in her arms.
“Thomas, he is going to kill her. He is going to kill them all.”
“This was their choice.” His voice was still strong and calm, but his eyes flicked fast between the girls struggling above him, the boy on the floor and the flint in Pearl’s fist. “It was their choice to fight against their destiny.”
“No, Thomas.” Pearl remembered the last time he’d had a firm grip on her wrist and she had forced him to make a choice.
Chapter 29
Over the noise of the battle, Pearl spoke clearly and slowly. “No, Thomas, this is your choice.”
Thomas’s eyes widened, and the pressure on her wrist relaxed.
In that moment, Pearl ripped her wrist out of his grasp and yelled, “EMMIE!” Using all her hunter’s skill at hitting a moving target, she flung the flint to Emmie, who let Ruby fall as she caught it, then swooped under her sister to hold her again.
Emmie swerved in the air to avoid another horn blast and dived over to Pearl, dropping a limp Ruby into her arms.
Then she flew to the rafters and held the flint, her lorefast, in both hands. And she began to sing, creating a fearful and furious music, but with no time to form words.
First she dropped a jangling rockfall of sharp notes onto Thomas’s head. He collapsed to the floor, letting go of his staff. Pearl kicked it aside, so when he sat up groaning he couldn’t reach it.
The Earl screamed as he saw his grandson fall, and gulped deep breath after deep breath to blow notes like storm-winds at Emmie.
She was battered by the air, her hair coiling round her head, her petticoats billowing round her legs. Pearl, standing guard between Thomas and his lorefast, found herself thinking that Emmie should wear boys’ trousers to fly in public.
Emmie’s flying was so fast and precise, she was able to ride the Earl’s blasts of sound or dive under them.
The Earl’s face was turning purple as he strained to get enough breath to match Emmie’s speed.
His thumping notes stopped for a second while he took a deep screeching chestful of air. Emmie swooped down and flung a cascade of noise at him that buried him under invisible power. His horn was torn from his lips and clattered to the floor, leaving him empty-handed as Emmie stood on the air in front of him.
Emmie pointed the flint at the Earl and began at last to sing words again. She sang a song brimming with anger: anger at being hunted and caught and compelled; anger at the bruised bodies of her brother and sisters; anger at being dragged from the schoolroom into someone else’s war.
The Earl shook in the waves of power, unable to get away, his head lolling back on a slack neck.
Pearl couldn’t move towards Emmie because of the drooping weight of Ruby in her arms, so she opened her mouth to yell, “No!”
But Emmie had made her choice.
She turned her back suddenly on the Earl, letting him fall to the ground, and flew straight at the stone throne, blasting the pillar off the oubliette and shattering it into a thousand pieces of gravel.
She screamed the trapdoor open, and sang a rising staircase of song until the Laird limped out, struggling free of the green reed rope.
Emmie hovered above the wreck of the feasting hall.
The air stopped shaking.
Pearl, arms trembling, placed Ruby on the floor beside Jasper. Both of them were breathing and Ruby was already moving weakly.
The Earl, Thomas and the Laird were all slumped on the ground.
“Now who will rule the mountains?” asked the Laird hoarsely.
Emmie floated down to perch on the remains of the stone throne.
“I will.”
Chapter 30
“I will look after the mountains,” Emmie said in her high clear voice.
“You!” spluttered the Earl.
“Me. You both created me, you both gave me your powers, but then you put me in a family where I could learn my way of using power, not yours.
“So I will listen to the mountains, Ruby and Jasper will listen to the Chayne lands, and the Swanns and Horsburghs will listen to your own lands. I will watch over both of you from the summits, and if you use bloodlore, or conspire to get more power than you need, then I will see and I will come down …”
She slashed the flint through the air, and the fires in the bowls flared into roaring fingers, reaching out for the Earl and the Laird, who scrambled away against the wall.
Emmie cut the fires back down, then smiled sweetly.
The Laird took out a silver flask, drank a large mouthful and offered it to the Earl, who accepted.
Pearl wiped Ruby and Jasper’s faces with a hanky she’d dropped on the floor when she was hunting through her pockets. Ruby was bashed and bruised, but not crying. Jasper groaned himself awake and asked, “Is everyone else alright?” Pearl nodded, hoping it was true.
Emmie jumped down from the cairn of rubble and trotted over to her family. Pearl stood up, amazed to see that Emmie was still shorter than her.
“Thank you,” Emmie hugged her. “Thank you for staying with us.”
“But why didn’t you tell me the flint had so much power in it?”
“If I’d told you, you’d have guarded it closely and kept checking your pockets. Then Thomas would have noticed. Anyway, I knew you would get it here safely; you never lose anything out of those pockets. And Thomas never guessed.”
They both looked ove
r at Thomas. He was sitting on the floor, far away from his grandfather, head tipped back against the wall. His lorefast lay abandoned by a smouldering bowl.
Pearl crossed the hall, picked up the staff and walked over to Thomas. As she carried it, she heard the pearl jumping lightly inside the shell. She offered the staff to Thomas. He ignored her.
She sat down near him. She didn’t say anything.
Eventually, he spoke. “I was weak. I made a sentimental choice. I should have been strong. I should have remembered my ambition and my mission, and not let anyone get in my way. I should have held on.”
He looked over at Emmie, talking quietly to Jasper and Ruby.
“But I think the mountains are in better hands, aren’t they?”
“I hope so,” said Pearl. Then she laughed, briefly. “Maybe this was everyone’s destiny after all.”
Thomas stared at her. “Do you believe that?”
“No. We all had to make choices, and it could have gone wrong so many times on the journey, couldn’t it?”
“It has gone wrong for me.”
Pearl shook her head and tapped the shell on his staff very gently. She heard the pearl shift and roll inside. “You have the ancient lorefast now. You did earn it. You can go and save the world, if you still think you’re the right person to do it.”
Thomas stood up and brushed dust off his trousers. “I should go home. The horses will be reaching the stables soon, and the grooms won’t like unsaddling rocking horses.”
Pearl nodded. “We should go home too. Mother will have sent out our groom and gardener to hunt for us when we didn’t turn up for supper.”
She held out the staff to him again. He took it, and looking at the lorefast rather than Pearl, he said, “Perhaps we could go hunting together again? You could teach me how to read the land as well as listen to it.”
“What would we hunt?”
“Deer or pheasant.” He looked straight at her. “Not swans or rocking horses.”
