by Helen Slavin
Crooked daylight. Borrowed moonlight. Ragged starlight.
The stones caught the sound. Nuala saw herself stretched thin as an old leaf, brittle as spring ice beneath the wild honeycomb of light and dark that spangled and scintillated around them. She felt the Strengths of the Witch Ways combine and take flight, as if every bird sang, each tree reached their roots towards them, the sky opened up, and the white eye of the moon focused itself down to this white-haired woman.
The crow-hearted girl.
There was no hiding. The Wrangle roared like a forge. Its white heat joined with the daylight, moonlight, starlight. In the incandescence, she pressed all her energy into the joint of the index finger on Aurora Foundling’s left hand. She felt the bone give. Nuala Whitemain was a breath away.
Cobwebs. Dead squirrels. Cat’s teeth. Blinded eye.
As the four women rose up before her, Nuala felt the clatter of small skulls against her skin. She looked out into emptied eye sockets, felt the cobwebs catch in her throat, tether and bind her.
The one with the cat’s teeth smiled, reached for the first cat-bone pin. The Wrangle shattered, and the red thread gave out. Nuala hesitated. What price for rescue, she wondered.
“They can’t kill you,” said the one with a gown made of dead squirrels in a pleased tone.
Nuala opened her mouth to bargain.
“Shush now,” said the one with a gown made of cobwebs, putting a finger to Nuala’s lips.
“They can’t kill you,” said the one with cat’s teeth.
“But we can.” They spoke with one screech and reached their thumbs to Nuala’s forehead.
The moment the red thread gave out, the Ways saw where Nuala and Aurora were locked in a duel. Anna gave a cry and tried to move, but she could not. Cobwebs wound and trailed at her, and she had an uneasy, broken recollection that this had happened to her once before. As she looked up, she saw Charlie folded on the ground, sobbing. Emz lunged towards Aurora.
Emz would be too late. She saw the four women freed, standing between Aurora and Nuala, their spell around them, hissing like snakes, making Aurora raise her thumb, licking it before she placed it on Nuala’s forehead. Emz reached, forcing all of her Strength towards Aurora. It was shoved back as the four women licked their thumbs, raised them to Nuala’s forehead.
Black fire. Thorns piercing Nuala’s skin.
The third woman turned her blinded eye to Emz and winked.
With a crack of lightning that threw Aurora onto the ground, the four women and Nuala Whitemain were gone.
Charlie and Anna rushed to Emz and Aurora. Aurora’s hair seemed to give off thin wisps of smoke, but she appeared otherwise unharmed.
The Gamekeepers and the foundling sat for some time. Nothing was said. No one moved to comfort anyone, because in this moment there was no comfort. There were tears and, then, rain.
Aurora stood up, stepped towards Charlie Way, and helped her to her feet.
Epilogue
The Heart of the Matter
It had been a week, and the Witch Ways had had no intention of returning to The Sisters any time soon, but Aurora had insisted. She had come to Hartfield to chide them.
“We have to.” She was decided. “It’s like getting back on a horse after it has thrown you.” The Way sisters were not enthusiastic as they stood in their triangulated positions around the table. Aurora noted this, even if they did not, and pushed harder.
“Will you do it for me?” And this time her smile was not so certain.
So here they were at last. Anna, Charlie, and Emz Way trekked through the edge of Havoc Wood and emerged into diamond-lustred spring sunlight at the edge of The Sisters stone circle. On that fateful night, the Ways had made a triangular escort, three points of protection around Aurora. Today Aurora Foundling was ahead, the Ways in her wake, as she halted at the Queen stone.
They entered the circle together, and at once Aurora breathed a bit more deeply.
“Oh.” She looked at the Ways. “It feels… normal.”
Anna, Charlie, and Emz felt that they no longer held any idea of what was normal. Charlie dug her hands into her jacket pockets. She was zipped up to the nose and gave a non-committal shrug.
“Shall we do a circuit?” Aurora suggested.
Charlie looked to her sisters. Both nodded, and they began to make their way around.
For the first time since Nuala’s departure, Emz felt free enough to let her Strength flex, and she looked for Aurora’s real face. It was haughty and beautiful and human. There were, Emz saw, suggestions of cobwebs in her hair. Her earrings looked like squirrel skulls, and her neck was adorned with an odd necklace whose beads resembled cat’s teeth. The left eye of her real face was filmed over, blinded. Magic, Emz realised, left its mark.
Charlie was quiet. In the immediate aftermath, they had been unable to speak and then, in the past twenty-four hours, something had worked loose, and they had let everything leave them. They were at the leading edge of grief, running just ahead of it, Charlie saw, each passing the baton to the other when it became too terrible to run with it alone.
Anna thought of a day, once upon a time, when she had come here with Calum. She felt where his fingerprints had once been on her skin and how they were forever printed over her heart.
The Witch Ways’ unconscious ceremony was completed. They all stood in the centre of the stone circle and looked up into the spring sky.
“We needed to do that.” Aurora smiled. “Time to go home.”
They walked out through the stones.
“I like your hair like that,” Emz said to Aurora. She had once again tied it back into a thick and intricate braid with a red ribbon. With her hair pushed back like this, you could see her face: the pale skin, the turquoise blue of her eyes. She looked refreshed.
“Tell the truth, I’m thinking of cutting my hair.” She made a snipping gesture. “Go for a complete change.”
Charlie looked surprised. “Won’t you miss it?”
The hair, even tied back, was just as wild and energetic.
Aurora shrugged. “It will always grow back.”
Anna nodded. “That’s a good point.” She looked up at the ridge ascending before them.
They walked for some moments in silence. Only when they were at the top of the ridge, the wind blowing at them with spring keenness, did Emz look up at Aurora.
“Did Winn ring you?” she asked.
Aurora shook her head. “Not checked my phone. I was in Castlebury all yesterday.” She unconsciously flounced her plait. “Why? What’s it about?”
“She’s had quite a few calls about wedding bookings.” Emz smiled as they made their way along the ridge back towards Hartfield.
At Cob Cottage that evening, the woodburner was only a little temperamental. Charlie found it meditative to faff about with kindling and paper, and long before Anna’s timer pinged for the oven, the living space at Cob Cottage was warmed and cosy.
The duvet was gone from Charlie’s former nest on the sofa, and Emz had run the vacuum cleaner over the rugs and flooring. There was a chink of crockery as Emz set the table for their guests, and as soon as Seren, Winn, Aurora, and Mrs Bentley arrived, there was tea and chatter and good food.
Everything was in place to make Woodcastle a wedding destination. The evening was positive and filled with promise.
The wood for the fire was almost the last from Grandma Hettie’s store. Charlie would cut more tomorrow. There was a spot set aside in Leap Woods for the task. She was determined to do it so that there would never be the last piece of wood cut by Grandma; the old and the new would meld.
Mrs Bentley’s idea of having a knight to officiate, or otherwise pose, at Castle weddings made Anna think of a day, so long ago, when she had met her own knight at the Brabazon School.
She needed some air, and, as Emz put the coffee pot on and Charlie cut the cakes they were sampling for Woodcastle Weddings, Anna opened the door and stepped out onto the porch.
Loss. It was a dee
p pit, and you stood at the edge and hoped to keep your balance.
To keep that careful balance, she looked back through the window to the interior scene, forward looking, full of the prospect of weddings and work and celebration. She turned back towards Pike Lake, breathed the air of Havoc in deep. She thought of the miles of footprints they had all trodden into the landscape.
She was about to go back inside when there was a movement at the edge of her vision. A lithe leap, upwards. Anna turned. The one-eyed chieftain of the Cordwainer cats, Velvet Joe, was hunched over at the top of the porch steps. He had something in his jaws and dropped it with a fleshy thomp. He looked up and then, with further agility, leapt down and off into the darkness.
Anna approached the offering. She had expected a bird or a rat; she had not anticipated a human heart. It was a little the worse for wear, marked by teeth, the aorta and other tuberous protuberances scragged at and torn on its journey out of someone’s chest cavity.
Anna’s thoughts flitted to Red Hat Lane and to the cat-bone pins that Nuala Whitemain had possessed. The Cordwainer cats had been her pitiful supply. What was this gory trophy? Was it, perhaps, Nuala Whitemain’s heart? There had been no body to find, but still, the Cordwainer cats had their own mysteries.
Anna did not hesitate to pick it up. She felt its heft, its sticky unctuousness as she walked to the lakeshore, squeezing it slightly between her fingers as she stepped up onto the flat rock at the water’s edge. She held it for a moment longer. The sky cleared; the thin paring of the new moon hit the surface of the lake. Anna hurled the heart out across the white-edged water.
The splash it made was like a bell tolling, a single sonorous note that set a perfect ripple riding out across the water, ever widening until the edges folded over themselves, sealing it forever into the black-deep, blue-cold waters of Pike Lake.
She turned back onto the porch. In the distance a church bell tolled three times, but it only glanced across the edges of her mind. The toll was lost in the noises from within as Anna opened the door. Laughter. Shot glasses sparkled like diamond as Charlie filled them with some new delight she had distilled, crisp as a knife edge. The door closed behind Anna.
The bell tolled again, three times more and, after taking a breath, three further soundings. This was not odd in the slightest, until you recalled that there was no bell in the church or the chapel. The wind stilled and listened as the final nine were tolled, the last note clear, skimming the surface of the lake. The sound ceased.
Havoc held its breath.
Prologue
Battlefield Playground
Aurora Foundling’s hair snagged at Charlie Way’s nerves. It was not just that there was a huge, wiry, candyfloss quantity of it. It was not that it was every shade of red imaginable woven into a tapestry of ginger fire. It was not that it crackled and snapped and made sounds like burning wood. The problem, for Charlie Way, was that if Aurora sat close by, Charlie could see that the strands and straggles drew up Maps, the kind that Charlie knew from Havoc Wood. How did someone get a Map in their hair like that? Aurora wasn’t allowed in Havoc Wood. She was not a Way and didn’t own the Wood, and Charlie was never going to invite such a stuck up and snotty person home to Cob Cottage. So, how had the Maps got into her hair? If she cut her hair, did the Maps fall on the floor?
Aurora’s hair troubled Charlie.
It was tied up when they played netball. Her mother plaited it into a rope that lashed about. Aurora was very good at netball — she was quick and light in her movements, and she aimed well. If Aurora was on your team you would win, because she was ruthless too.
But she didn’t cheat. Charlie watched as Cora Brightman stepped sideways, her foot purposely catching Aurora’s leg so that Aurora crashed to the floor, her face grazing against the hard surface of the netball court. The whistle blew.
“Are you alright?” Miss Neill did not move from her perch on the low, stone wall that divided the Infant and Junior playgrounds. Aurora glared. Charlie waited for Miss Neill to tell Cora she shouldn’t be such a big bully, but instead she blew the whistle, and Cora snatched the ball.
It was no good. Aurora, her hair fizzing with rage, played hard, her shrill shrieks of instruction ordered her teammates to move this way, throw that. They dribbled and passed with skill borne of a desire to get the ball away from themselves and not make Aurora cross or attract the sly kicks and hard shoves meted out by Cora.
Cora shoved Charlie out of her way. Charlie dodged and shoved back, Cora stumbling and outraged, her hand going up in protest.
“Miss Neill…?”
Miss Neill hugged deeper into her fleece and blew the whistle.
“One foot on the floor, Charlie, remember. One foot on the floor.”
Charlie wanted to have one foot on Cora Brightman’s head. Instead she grabbed the ball, and she and Aurora began to work in tandem, the other team members passing the ball as quickly as a hot coal in an effort not to be bruised, battered, or bounced. It was a revenge move for Cora to reach for Aurora’s plait — the white hand snatching at the hefty twine of it — and with a smooth and calculated move, tugging her downwards, as if Aurora was a hot air balloon in need of an emergency landing.
As Aurora fell, the skin of her arm was chewed by the netball court, blood oozing, the skin peeling back in dead white frills. Aurora was pale as snow, the breath knocked out of her. As the teams dissolved into screams, Charlie caught the ball and, with a cry of “BULLY”, bounced it off Cora’s face as if it was a cannon ball.
Someone was sent to fetch Mrs Donovan who was in charge of first aid. Miss Neill stepped onto the court and, bypassing Aurora, moved straight to examine Cora’s blotched face.
“Charlotte Way, you will apologise at once.” Miss Neill’s bony hand tugged at Charlie so that she was standing in front of Cora, who was milking her outrage and pain, her face gurning into grimaces and winces. “Say sorry right now.” Miss Neill pointed at Cora.
“I will not.” Charlie folded her arms. “She’s a bully. She pulled Aurora down by her hair. You saw her. I will not say sorry, because I’m not sorry.” Charlie was seething, her face burning hot.
“Apologise.” Miss Neill was still looking at Charlie. Charlie shook her head.
“No.” Charlie stood her ground. The other girls were ranged around the court, eyes cast downwards away from the horror. “Tell her to say sorry. Tell her to stop being a bully.”
Mrs Donovan was approaching, armed with her little green first aid suitcase.
“Charlie pushed her over,” said Cora as Mrs Donovan knelt beside the tearful and war-torn Aurora.
“You pulled her down by her hair.” Charlie looked around. No one backed her up. They were all very interested in the cracks in the tarmac of the playground, even Miss Neill.
“Go and get changed.” Miss Neill pointed the finger of doom.
“I did not push her. I did not.” Charlie boiled inside; the world was giving way beneath her. She was like the inside of that volcano they were making in their “How The World Works” project.
She was quiet all the way home, letting Emz do all the chitchat with Grandma Hettie. They were staying at Cob Cottage this next few weeks as their mother had been called away to the Arctic once more.
“And how was your day?” Grandma Hettie asked.
“It was a day,” Charlie growled.
She was silent through supper, even though Anna had made her favourite mac and cheese.
“What happened today?” Anna asked as they dished up the Bakewell tart, and Charlie was not going to cry.
Except she did, and the whole story spilled out, and so Grandma Hettie lit the lantern, and they pulled on their jackets and headed out to check on the frogspawn at the edge of the lake, and then came inside later and ate the Bakewell tart.
“You did the right thing.” Grandma Hettie smiled and stroked her hair. “You stood up to a bully.”
But, lying awake later, Charlie couldn’t help thinking she’d been flatte
ned by all of them, all standing staring at the floor, and she hated them.
A week later and Hettie Way was entering the primary school after hours. It smelt of sick and chalk dust with a seal of some horrid synthetic-scented polish that the caretaker was currently buffing onto the assembly hall floor to turn it into a part-time skating rink. The windows, Hettie noted, were too high to look out of, showing, this afternoon, only the grey overcast sky.
Anna had come with her to walk Charlie and Emz home before Hettie herself crossed the playground, bounded as it was by spiked iron bars. As the headteacher, Miss Marlowe, opened her office door, Hettie was reminded of the historic tales of the Assizes at the castle, of the rule of law held in place by thumbscrews.
Miss Marlowe had summoned her by telephone to visit after school and discuss Charlie’s “recent behaviour”.
“She assaulted a pupil,” Miss Marlowe stated, making her hands into a small temple of righteousness beneath her pinched mouth and her glowering eyes. Hettie Way was not to be pinched or glowered.
“I understand she defended an injured fellow pupil. She threw a ball at a bully,” Hettie clarified. Miss Marlowe raised an eyebrow a smidgin. Ugh, was there a worse measure in the world than a smidgin? Hettie let the thought wander a little to calm herself. It would not do to punch Miss Marlowe.
“She assaulted a fellow pupil,” Miss Marlowe insisted. “We cannot allow such behaviour.”
“But you can allow the bully to torment and intimidate other ‘fellow’ pupils? This Cora Brightman pulled Aurora Foundling down by her hair.” Hettie offered her evidence.
“It is not Charlotte’s place to…”
“Charlie dealt with the bully after she hurt Aurora Foundling. I notice Miss Neill didn’t wade in.” Hettie rested her case. Miss Marlowe’s eyebrows remained static, her left eyelid fluttered just a, oh dear, another smidgin.
“You were not present, and only have Charlotte’s word for what happened. Charlie assaulted a fellow pupil.”
