by Lari Don
Beth stood up, collected a map and said, “Thanks for saving my life, Molly. I will return the favour. But not this week.” And she left.
Atacama used his claws to pull down a map. He studied it, then pushed it away. He looked up at Molly, still sitting at the desk. “The rest of us understand magical dangers better than you do. Perhaps you should accept your curse, rather than compete with us for this egg.” He left too.
Molly was alone with the toad.
“I don’t think we’re a team any more,” she said.
The toad jumped down and walked slowly out of the classroom.
Molly sat on her own, thinking about the sphinx’s advice. Then she stood, picked up a map and went to search for a stone egg.
Chapter 18
Molly had learned how to read a map on an orienteering project in Primary 6, but the witch’s map didn’t look like any map she’d seen before. As well as the usual rivers, roads and contour lines, it had unfamiliar symbols in gold and silver, and curly lettered warnings about the homes of local brownies and basilisks.
It appeared to be a map of magical locations around Craigvenie. Mrs Sharpe’s farm was in the centre, and in the bottom left corner was a shimmering golden arrow pointing to the words: Stone Egg Wood and a tiny picture of an arch. So that’s where Molly had to go.
But how could she get there? She looked closer at the map. There was a road leading out of Craigvenie that would take her two thirds of the way. Then she’d have to go cross-country.
She didn’t have time to study the map properly. Both Innes and Atacama were incredibly fast, and would get to the Stone Egg Wood long before her. Beth was quicker on a bike than she was. Molly had no idea what the toad’s powers were, apart from supernaturally efficient toilet-building, but it would probably beat her to the wood too.
Molly knew it was unlikely she would complete this task before any of her former teammates, but she wasn’t going to give up. Not without a race.
She ran to the shed, planning to cycle part of the way. The bikes she and Beth had ridden to Cut Rigg Farm were still leaning against the wall. Did Beth have a faster form of transport?
Then Molly noticed that all four tyres had been slashed. The wheel rims of both bikes were resting on the ground. She couldn’t tell whether the cuts were made by a knife, a claw or teeth. But it didn’t really matter.
The slashes made it absolutely clear that the five of them were no longer helping each other.
They weren’t even racing each other.
Now they were sabotaging each other.
So Molly started walking.
She headed briskly down the lane, trying to read the map as she strode along, looking at the odd symbols and notations on either side of the route to Stone Egg Wood.
Devil’s Cauldron
Giant’s Cradle
Wolf Stane
Molly would probably try to avoid those locations.
She remembered, with a faint reluctant ache in her muscles, that when her teacher had taken them orienteering, they ran between control points. It wouldn’t be as fast as cycling, but she should give it a go.
After tracing her fingers along the route to double check she was heading southwest towards the mountains, she folded the map, put it in her back pocket and started to jog.
In the first ten minutes, Molly was overtaken by a library van, a whisky lorry and a family out for a day-trip on their bikes, including a giggling four year old on a glittery bike.
Molly sighed. She was already losing this race. Not just to the irregular traffic on the narrow road, she was losing to the white horse, the black sphinx and probably the dryad and toad as well. Unless she could find a faster way to travel, she would fail at this task before she even began.
As she ran towards higher ground, her legs started to feel heavy. She couldn’t keep up this pace for much longer.
She couldn’t run all the way. Not as a girl.
But she could run all the way as a hare. And much faster.
She stopped and leant forward, hands on knees, gasping for breath.
Did she want to become a hare? Even if she did want to, how could she shift without a dog’s bark to trigger the curse?
Molly looked at the fields by the road. She looked at the bare earth and soft grass, and she knew how it would feel to run on that ground as a hare. She would feel light and free. She would feel capable of winning any race and completing any task.
But could she deliberately choose to be a hare? Should she?
She clambered off the road, over the verge and fence, into the field. And she said, “Woof.”
Nothing happened. Obviously. She sounded like a child reading a picture book about doggies. Dogs didn’t say ‘woof’ any more than ducks said ‘quack’ or mice said ‘squeak’.
She thought about the dogs that had barked at her this week, the dogs that had triggered her change.
Molly licked her lips and yipped like the small dog by the river.
She looked at her hands, which were still hands.
Then she tensed her stomach muscles and tried a deep bark like Mr Crottel’s wolfhound.
Her hands were still pale human skin.
In her frustration, with no words to express how she felt about this ridiculous desire to be a hare, Molly growled, like one of Atacama’s purrs, vibrating at the back of her throat. As she growled, she felt a brief ripple of warmth up her spine.
She thought, dogs don’t just bark. They also growl.
She closed her eyes and thought about how frustrated she was that she couldn’t run faster as a girl, and also how frustrated those dogs were when they couldn’t catch her as a hare.
She imagined herself running from a dog, bouncing, leaping, flying through the air. She imagined how the dog felt, watching its prey get away.
And from that frustration, she growled, deep in her throat.
GurRRRrrr
Suddenly she felt a flash of welcome heat up and down her spine.
She opened her eyes and looked down at the earth, just below her nose. And at her own brown paws.
I hope I don’t regret this, she thought. I hope I can change back.
But she didn’t regret it. Not for one second. She bounced and she leapt and she ran. Not dodging, not zigzagging, not trying to escape. She wasn’t trying to escape from a predator, and she wasn’t trying to escape from herself either.
She ran like she’d seen Innes run. In a straight line, aiming for a goal and powering towards it. She ran towards the wild lands of the Cairngorms, towards Stone Egg Wood.
Then, as she leapt over a low wall, she was falling, rolling over herself, banging knees and elbows.
She shook her head. She’d crossed a boundary into someone else’s land. So, just like falling off a bike, she had to get right back on.
She growled again, a deep wild sound, to call the wild animal inside her. And the hare came back.
So Molly ran and leapt and stretched into her fastest speed.
The next time she shifted back to a girl, she put her hand in her back pocket. She grinned. Just as her clothes reappeared when she became human, so did the hair bobble, the twenty-pence piece and the folded map in her pocket.
She growled and ran again.
Molly followed the line of the road, running through the fields and, when the land became too high and scrubby for crops, running across wild grass and heather.
Then the road curved round a hill and she crashed to the ground again as a girl. She checked the map. It was time to leave the guidance of the road and set off cross-country. She took her bearings from the high mountains in the distance, growled, and ran into the moors towards the Stone Egg Wood.
Molly couldn’t see trees or walls or anything ahead that looked like a magical wood. But she knew she was running in the right direction. She had to trust the map.
So she ran and ran.
She suspected that this wasn’t how hares were meant to run. They sprinted when they were chased, they didn’t r
un for hours and hours. However, she had a girl’s mind and determination inside this hare’s body, and she’d keep her fast legs running for as long as necessary.
Anyway, her hare legs weren’t getting tired the way her human legs had on the road. Maybe she had endless hare energy for running, like Innes had endless kelpie energy for work.
She didn’t know who owned this bare land. Whoever it was, they owned a great big chunk of it, because she hadn’t stumbled over into her girl self since she left the road.
Which was a problem. If she couldn’t shift back to a girl, how could she read the map, and how could she find and steal and carry a stone egg?
Molly stopped and crouched on the fragrant damp ground.
There was no point continuing to run, even though she wasn’t tired. She had to check the map or she might run past the entrance.
She had turned herself into a hare. Could she turn herself back?
Molly thought about being a girl. About her hands and fingers, her feet and toes, her freckled skin.
But she stayed a hare.
She thought about stumbling and falling when she crossed a boundary. About ripped jeans and clumsy limbs.
But she stayed a hare.
She tried to say her name, but her mouth couldn’t form the words.
And she stayed a hare.
So, she could manipulate the curse to shift into a hare, but she couldn’t shift back without a boundary.
She stood on her hind legs, stretched as high as she could and looked around for anything that might mark a change of land ownership: a wall, a fence, a track.
But there was nothing. Just dark bumpy land, bright glimmers of water and white windmills dancing in the distance.
Then she realised there was one long unbroken glimmer of water to the southwest. Not a pool or a marsh. A narrow river.
That might be a boundary.
She sprinted towards the river, then leapt across. She landed hard, just before the opposite bank, soaking her clothes, and bashing her shoulder on the slimy stones.
She was a girl again.
She clambered out, dripping and bruised, but taller, with useful hands.
Molly stood on the riverbank and scanned the landscape. There was no wood, no big group of trees, for miles. The only trees were stunted windblown birches, most of them shorter than her, growing in the occasional shelter where the river cut through low rises of earth.
Then she noticed a purple-and-black shape by one of the largest, most crooked birches. A bike.
Molly ran over. It was a mountain bike, chunky and muddy. This must be Beth’s own bike.
So the bad news was that Beth had already arrived, but the good news was that the entrance must be nearby.
Molly pulled out the map and sat down to study it.
By the words Stone Egg Wood, there was a tiny sketch of a low dark arch.
An arch in a wall? But there were no walls around here.
An arch in a cliff? But the mountains were miles to the south, and they were lumpy heathery slopes, not slabs of rock.
An arch in what?
This land wasn’t really flat, it was bumpy, with slices cut through the bumps by water, by peat cutters, by sheep and deer tracks. Perhaps there was a low dark arch in one of these peaty banks?
The dryad would have left her bike by the tree nearest the arch. Molly stood beside the bike and looked carefully around her.
She suddenly saw a black patch on a nearby slope of brown peaty earth. She walked over. It was an archway, carved into the ground. The same low curved shape as the arch on the map.
So Molly took a deep breath and stepped into the hole in the dark earth.
Chapter 19
The tunnel was damp, peaty smelling, and slightly warmer than the air outside. It became darker as Molly moved further from the sunlight, round gentle downward bends. But after a few moments blundering forward, she saw a blur of dim blue-ish light ahead.
As she got closer, she saw the light was coming through an open door, one of a pair of white wooden doors across the width of the tunnel. The two doors were covered in carved trees with birds and nests balanced in their branches and with snakes, people, horses and flames writhing around their roots.
Then Molly noticed words carved on ribbons round the trunks of the trees. When she followed the ribbons across from the open door to the closed door, the words read:
Molly frowned. Who had opened the door? Had one of her former teammates whispered the right name to the right carved bird? Molly didn’t have to work it out though, because the door was still open.
So she stepped cautiously through into Stone Egg Wood.
She found herself in a long hall, dimly lit by glowing blue mosses on the floor, filled with trees reaching upwards to the almost impossibly high roof, where warm yellow light poured in through open slits.
The trees were leafless and barkless. She touched the nearest stripped trunk. It was cold and felt more like stone than wood.
She looked around. All the trees were pale grey, mineral-coloured, glittering like mica. Was this a wood of stone trees, as well as stone eggs?
She walked further into the hall, moving quietly on the glowing moss, glancing back every few steps to make sure she didn’t lose sight of the door.
Who else was here? Who had opened that door? Where were the eggs?
Ahead of her, Molly saw a wide open space and a glint of water beyond. The curse-hatched crows had found or created a complete cold hard landscape, hidden under the moor.
She looked up and saw nests woven from white twigs and blue gems, held high in the stone trees’ branches, far out of reach.
The stone eggs must be in those nests, thought Molly.
And higher than the nests, she saw birds. Hundreds of roosting black crows, silent and still, sleeping in the topmost twigs.
Then Molly saw movement to her right.
She hid behind a trunk and watched a black shape trying to climb a tree. Atacama, slipping down faster than he could climb up.
She heard a familiar laugh and a whisper. “Your claws are no good on stone.” Innes was also trying to climb a tree, also slipping down.
Molly shook her head. If they gave each other a leg up, one of them could probably reach the lowest branches. But they weren’t helping each other; they were trying to climb different trees.
She didn’t want them to know she was here. She moved to her left, hoping to find an easier tree.
Instead, she found Beth.
She nearly stood on the dryad, who was slumped at the base of a slim stone trunk.
Beth was gasping, struggling for breath.
Molly knelt down and touched the dryad’s white cheek. Beth was freezing cold. Her green eyes opened and she whispered, “Molly! I can’t move…”
Molly touched the glowing moss with her fingertips. It was warm. The air was warm. “Why are you so cold?”
“The trees… are fossilised. The trees… are stone. I’m turning to…” She gasped again. “Must get out, but can’t move…”
Molly grabbed Beth’s hand. Her fingers were stiff and unbending.
“Obviously I could save your life again,” whispered Molly, “but I didn’t think we were doing that this week. I could come back next week…”
Beth moaned softly and closed her eyes.
Molly sighed. “Of course I’ll help. It’s not like I’m throwing away a realistic chance to win this task. Come on.” She slid her arms under Beth’s oxters and dragged the dryad as quietly as she could towards the doors.
Not quietly enough. The sleeping birds didn’t hear her, but the kelpie did.
Molly looked up to find Innes standing between her and the open door.
“What are you doing, hare-girl?”
“She’s turning to stone. I’m getting her out of here.”
“You don’t have to do that. It’s everyone for themselves now. You’ve no chance of beating me anyway, but you’ll certainly never win if you stop to help your riv
als.”
“I know. But I couldn’t leave her here.”
The kelpie was staring at her, frowning at her.
“Innes, I couldn’t just step over her.”
“Why not?” he said. “I did.”
He walked towards another tree and tried to reach his arms around the smooth trunk.
Molly dragged Beth out the open doorway. It wasn’t easy pulling her along the soft peaty tunnel, but as they got further from the stone trees she warmed up and began to push with her feet.
When they reached the open air, Molly hoisted Beth upright and helped her to the river. The dryad slumped on the bank, splashed her face in the water and said, “Thank you. Again.”
“It’s ok. I’d better get back in.”
“No, wait,” said Beth. “How did you get here?”
“How did you get here? Did you cycle all the way?”
“Just the last bit. Uncle Pete gave me a lift most of the way in his Land Rover. How did you get here so fast?”
“I’m a part-time hare, remember. I’d better go back.”
“Wait. Has Innes stolen his egg yet?”
“No, he’s still trying to climb up a tree. Did he get in first? How did you all get through that door?”
“Innes opened the door just before I arrived. He didn’t kick it in; that would have been too noisy. I assume he worked out the password. I heard him telling Atacama that he’d have closed the door and shut the rest of us in the tunnel, but he needed to leave himself a clear exit. I’m sure Innes will get up a tree eventually. He’s quite determined.”
“Determined is one word for him,” said Molly. “Also selfish, ruthless, hard-hearted…”
Beth sighed. “I can’t win the task now, without an egg. I didn’t realise the trees would be so cold and dangerous, and no one expected them to be so difficult to climb.” Then she smiled, very slightly. “It would be nice if someone could beat Innes. How was Atacama doing?”
“Like a cat trying to run up a glass door. Not dignified and not getting to the top.”
