“No,” I croaked. “A friend… helped me.”
You’ll be burned alive, I thought. Because you cheated. The fire will take you and reduce you to ashes.
But it didn’t. Instead it asked me quietly, once more, and it was as if there were an undercurrent of laughter in its voice:
Who are you, little wildwitch?
And then I understood. It was why we were here. It was what the trial was all about.
“Someone who speaks the truth,” I said. “Someone who speaks the truth – or stays silent.”
There could be no doubt now. The flames were laughing, they danced around me, wild and affectionate at the same time, but they didn’t hurt me. Their roar turned into a song, red and golden in the darkness of the night. And when I finally dared open my eyes, that was when I saw it.
The firebird.
With feathers and wings of flames, its neck, tail and beak made from fire, its eyes like liquid gold. It rose towards the sky in a burst of sparks that scattered over me like stars from a sparkler.
Well answered, little wildwitch. You have the fire in your heart.
It swept across the treetops and made the ravens flap their wings, it swooped down on me in a loving and teasing dance before rising again, soaring and soaring until it was just a flame-coloured silhouette against the moon.
Then it was gone. And the silence was total.
Of the seven Raven Mothers only one was still standing: Thuja. Her voice was croakier than her raven’s; she was swaying and had to support herself against the tree behind her.
“Clara Ash has passed the Heartfire,” she said. And then she slumped down with her back against her tree.
I didn’t feel tired at all. Not yet. It was as if the firebird’s laughter were still bubbling inside me, and not even my knee hurt now.
“You did it!” cheered Kahla, who was the first to reach me. She grabbed both my arms and danced around with me until everything in front of my eyelash-less eyes started to spin. “You did it, you did it, you did it!”
“Oh, my dear,” Aunt Isa said. “Your old aunt is so proud of you.”
And a large cat, as black as midnight, strolled towards us, purring like a well-oiled motor bike.
Mine, it sang contentedly and proudly inside my head. My wildwitch.
But our celebrations were short-lived. The ravens, the crows, the jackdaws and all the rooks started squawking and screaming and hissing at once. In unison they took flight and ascended towards the moon like a black cloud.
“Now what?” I said, stunned. “What’s happening?”
Thuja grabbed the bark on the tree trunk and got back on her feet.
“It’s Chimera,” she said. “She has fled.”
And then I saw her, a larger shape in-between the others, a giant bird who wasn’t a bird and most certainly not an angel, either. The ravens chased her, but her huge eagle wings weren’t just for show, and the black birds started dropping like stones, feathered black balls falling and crashing to the ground.
“No!” Thuja cried out in despair, pressing both hands against her blind eyes. “The ravens are dying! She’s killing the ravens!”
I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look on her face. Her blind grief wasn’t just for the sight she no longer had. She scrambled around on her hands and knees, touching one dead bird after another, but she couldn’t find the raven that had once been hers.
CHAPTER 22
The Last Word
Nearly half the great black birds in Raven Kettle died that night. And Chimera escaped. She was declared an outlaw and shunned by the wildworld, but although the survivors looked for her for as long as their necks or wings could carry them, they never found her. It was as if the ground had swallowed her up – or perhaps, more accurately, as if she’d been spirited away into the dark midnight air.
Thuja sat by the fireplace in her room where she could feel the warmth against her face although she could no longer see the flames. Her hands lay empty and idle in her lap.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish there was something I could do.”
Thuja turned at the sound of my voice, but she didn’t get up.
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “We only have ourselves to blame.”
“Why?”
“We should have listened sooner. And we should have made new laws a long time ago so we wouldn’t have been forced to try you as they did in the days of Bravita Bloodling.” She held out both her hands and after a moment’s confusion I realized that she wanted to say goodbye. I put my hand in hers. Although her grip was warm and light, I could feel how much strength there was in her still. “It’s time for you to go home now, Clara Ash. I promise you that we’ll keep looking for Chimera. She won’t be allowed to hurt you again. But I rather think that black cat of yours would stop her if she tried, don’t you?”
“I think so,” I said, and couldn’t help smiling. “And perhaps a couple of other friends, too. But what about you? Will you… will you ever be able to see again?”
“In time,” she said. “When the new brood is hatched in spring I’ll start over with a new chick. It usually takes a year or two before you get to know each other well enough to borrow one another’s senses.”
“Good luck,” I said, and meant it.
“You too, Clara Ash.”
When we emerged from the fog of the wildways at the gate by the white stones, the first thing I saw was the little blue Kia parked in the yard next to Aunt Isa’s rusty old banger.
“Mum!”
I barely had to touch Star with my heels, she was that keen to return to her safe, warm stable. We ended up galloping down the gravel road with clumps of grass flying around our ears until we reached the farmhouse.
The door opened and Mum and Bumble came out. Bumble behaved as he always did – bouncing and dancing and wagging his tail and getting in his own way and almost under Star’s hooves, too. Mum stood still, as if she could barely believe her own eyes.
“Clara Mouse! Oh, sweetheart…”
I let myself slide down from Star’s back and dropped the reins so the horse could wander back to the stable. No new stable door had been fitted, so the goats were free to come and go as they pleased.
“You sounded so strange on the phone,” Mum said, pulling me close and hugging me in a way she hadn’t done since I was eight. “So I had to come. And when you weren’t here…” She gulped down a big mouthful of air and hugged me even tighter. “You were gone such a long time. I didn’t know what to think…”
“But now we’re back,” I said. “And tomorrow we can go home together!”
But that wasn’t the end of the story, obviously. I had to tell Oscar what had happened and make Cat understand that it wasn’t cool to sink four sharp cat claws into the soft nose of Oscar’s labrador. Oscar was the only one I told because we tell each other everything. Everyone else just thought I’d been ill and away at some kind of home for sick children to recover. I also had to persuade Aunt Isa to buy a mobile and walk up the hill to call us every now and then with news of Bumble, Star, the goats and all the other animals. And of Kahla.
“You won’t be held back by the new girl now,” I told her when we said goodbye.
“No,” she said. “So I’ll probably learn more.” But then she gave me a quick woolly hug. “Take care of yourself. And… if you did come back, I wouldn’t actually mind…”
It felt weird to be back in the flat and with Oscar and at school again. I’d been gone almost three weeks. Twenty days when I counted them. It felt more like twenty months. Everything felt so different, especially on the inside.
“My,” Mum said the first morning I was going back to school, “haven’t you grown?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think I have.”
That’s because you have me.
I looked down and met Cat’s amber eyes. He looked incredibly pleased with himself.
“I think I can manage growing without your help,” I huffed.
; He snorted. I don’t think so.
There was no point in arguing. When you have a cat, don’t ever expect to get the last word.
NEXT IN THE
WILDWITCH
SERIES
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Copyright
Pushkin Press
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London, WC2H 9JQ
Original text copyright © Lene Kaaberbøl, Copenhagen 2010
Published by agreement with! Copenhagen Literary Agency, Copenhagen
Translation © Charlotte Barslund, 2016
Illustrations © Rohan Eason
Wildwitch: Wildfire was originally published in Danish as Vildheks: Ildprøven by Alvilda in 2010
This translation first published by Pushkin Children’s Books in 2016
ISBN 978 1 782691 14 3
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