by CJ Arroway
The slime of the wall had clogged the spaces between her fingers, and the cloying mass made the skin of her arm shudder. She wiped her hand on the hem of her tunic then reached again for the guidance of the wall, and felt another hand already there.
In the darkness there was no knowing what was happening, but Evie was suddenly in the tight grip of strong arms. Another set of hands had grabbed her feet, and now a torch was lit and she could see four men.
She tried to scream defiance but her mouth was still covered with her tunic and a heavy hand pushed against it so that her words were muffled to almost nothing.
The men were silently efficient in their work, signalling each other by torchlight to take her deeper into the cave. She tried to kick her legs but the grip of the men was too strong.
Three of the men held her and the other held the torch as he showed them down the narrow passageway. He signalled to stop. Then suddenly the torch extinguished and the deep dark returned.
There was a gurgled scream, shouts of confusion, two more cries and then Evie was being dragged by her feet back the way she came and towards the mossy entrance and the river.
She bounced along the ground as it rose and fell to bring its mud and jagged rocks up sharply into her chest, arms and face. She was being dragged and pulled as if she were a sack of firewood, but the pain was nothing now to her fear and confusion.
She was face down in the mud as she exited the passageway. The thin light of the entrance platform lit up the space enough so that as she twisted she saw the man who had pulled her back through the cave. Skavan.
The sound of one of the first men scrambling away from her and back deeper into the passageway confused her even more. If Skavan had pulled her out, she thought, who had he taken her from?
‘Excuse me a second,’ Skavan said, stepping over Evie without letting go of his grip on her leg. He briefly looked at the heavy, rounded boulder that stood to the side of the passage entrance, then put his shoulder to it and pushed it to drop into and down the steep slope of the tunnel entrance. ‘Right that should keep him busy. Now let’s deal with you.’
Evie had managed to kick her leg free as Skavan was working on the rock and had backed towards the ledge of the cave.
‘You’re not going to get down there quicker than I will,’ he said. ‘Well, you probably would if you tried but you’d be a bit the worse for wear at the bottom, and you won’t be much use to me then.’
‘They’re going to kill me anyway, I’m not who you think I am,’ she shouted, frantically looking behind for something – anything – she could use to defend herself.
Skavan laughed. ‘Ah, now you need to have more faith in yourself. You should value yourself more highly. Orlend does. Don’t worry, he doesn’t want to hurt you, he just wants to talk to you.’ He saw the confused look on her face, and curled his scarred lip. ‘Why don’t you come with me nice and easy and you can find out all about it.’
Skavan edged closer to her. Evie closed her eyes and put her hands to the ground – the wet of the cave floor stirred around Skavan’s feet as he mockingly danced in its shallow pools. ‘Not much for you to play with here is there?’
‘Come on, I’m fed up with this now. I’m taking you and I’m going to get what I need. Don’t struggle and you won’t get hurt,’ he paused in mock thought for a moment. ‘Oh, no, wait a minute – you will get hurt. I’m going to pay you back for what your little friend did to me before we go anywhere else.’ He pointed to the jagged, still raw, scar that now ran across his left cheek and nose, distorting the socket of his right eye.
Evie kept her eyes closed and her hands to the ground, her face screwed up in deep concentration as she searched for some power she might have to save herself.
Skavan’s eyes narrowed, pulling at one corner where the stitches had not fully healed and a thin sheen of red tissue broke through. ‘Don’t bother trying your magic tricks again. I wasn’t expecting it the first time, but I have your number now, little Jackdaw, and there’s nothing you’ve got that can hurt me, I promise you that.’
He straddled Evie’s prone body and grabbed her firmly by the hair, yanking her face up to where his hunting knife waited to bite. And Evie threw every ounce of her weight into her small fist as it landed with perfect precision into the soft places between Skavan’s legs.
Skavan howled in agony and doubled over, clutching the back of his knees as he tried to suck all the pain back into his body where he could process it, his eyes watering like the moss that dripped above his head.
In an instant Evie rolled to the side, and with one sharp kick sent his unbalanced body tumbling through the green curtain and down onto the rocks below.
She stood up and forced the moss aside, leaning over to see Skavan’s silent form spread across the flat stone of the river bed below. She screamed a roar that seemed bigger than her body could possibly have held – every drop of anger and hurt released in a primal sound that echoed around the gully walls.
‘Why did you take everything I had? What did I ever do to you?’
She clenched her fists tightly at her side and threw her head back, as the dripping cave wetted and cooled her reddening forehead. She stood at the cave edge for a minute, staring down at Skavan’s stillness. Then she started her climb down, knowing the end had come.
The End
Orlend’s forces now stood at the bottom of the steep slope that led to Cran Dy’s summit. Their numbers were so many that they filled the width of the narrow valley floor, and even then a long line of warriors stretched back along the path through the swamps, as if waiting their turn to join in the slaughter to come.
They were close enough that the few Cyl on the hilltop could hear their taunts – their promises of what was to come, for the warriors and for their families.
As many Cyl warriors as could fit were stood on the edge of the hill facing them. To show a vision of spears and shields to the army below; to let them know they would not take this hill cheaply. Among them, Nan, Rachlaw and Luda stood together.
Luda looked at his spear and wondered if he would have the chance to use it before he died. Just one moment to excise all the hate and anger he felt inside now – just one kill. Around the wrist of his spear hand he had tied Evie’s necklace. As he looked at it he thought the worst part of being dead would be to not know if Evie was safe.
‘Do you think she’ll make it through, Rachlaw?’ he said.
Rachlaw looked down at him, at his ill-fitting armour and the untrained way he held his spear, and he nodded. ‘I know she will Luda – I feel it. It’s fate.’ He turned his gaze to Nan, who returned it kindly.
‘I am ready to die,’ Luda said.
‘So am I, Luda,’ Rachlaw returned, ‘so are we all.’
He turned to the assembled Cyl warriors, their spears readied, their shields poised to form a wall that could hold back the sea of death coming their way for maybe a few minutes at most.
‘Are you ready to die?’ he called.
‘Yes!’ The roar came from all the warriors as one great war cry.
Rachlaw called again, louder this time: ‘Are you ready to die?’
The roar came back again, echoing across the valley.
‘Are you ready to die?’
‘Yes!’
And then the Sea People came.
* * *
Evie was battered and broken. Her torn hands could barely grip the greasy walls of the gully as she made her way down. But this time she was unafraid to fall, her only concern was that she might die here alone, instead of alongside her friends.
Her hand slipped on the wet rock and she fell the last short drop to the gully floor. Her knee buckled underneath her sending a sharp pain through her leg that froze her on the spot for what felt like minutes.
Eventually she found the strength to move again – pushing up through the river as it seemed to push her back half as far again each time it surged. The steep gully floor that had been hard travelling on the way down now se
emed impossible. Wet rocks that had hurt to slide down refused to let her back up, and she had to scramble as far sideways along the slopes as she did upwards. Above her she could hear voices calling across the valley – the unmistakable sounds of anger and fear in their tone.
The water was now battering her as she tried to wade and push against its flow. Her eyes stung so that she could barely see the sticks and reeds that were caught in the rushing water, as they whipped her face and she fought to keep her hands ahead of her to lessen their force.
Slowly, painfully, she made her way back up the gully to where she had clambered down. Then she stopped. Ahead of her was the glassy slide of a steep narrow rapid she had glided down on her journey to the cave. While it was not too high, it was almost vertical – steeper than she remembered it – and the water and weeds had made its surface free from any natural grip.
She looked at it and she felt her twisted knee, her battered hands. She knew she would never make it.
She would welcome the end. She was tired of running, tired of losing those she loved, tired of hiding and tired of being told who she was. She would welcome the end and welcome sleep.
Evie took out the linen bag Rachlaw had given her and perched on a flat rock just below the rapids, out of reach of the water’s strong flow.
Above her she could hear the roar of the Cyl, and she thought she heard Rachlaw call too. She listened – another roar, then Rachlaw’s voice was clearer. ‘Are you ready to die?’ he called. Evie opened the bag and whispered to herself, and to the rushing water, ‘Yes, yes I am.’
In her palm, she held the cloth open. The herbs had been wetted by the river and she hoped they would still work. She looked at them – leaves and flowers and berries – and tried to think what each one would be; if she knew them from her forest.
Then she saw the yellow flowers – darkened by water, but unmistakable. The flowers she had seen on Nan’s scroll before she had gone with Bryndl to the Spirit World. She remembered Rachlaw’s words on the folly of fate, and she believed he was right. But when all hope is gone, fate can be a comfort, if nothing else.
She remembered Rachlaw’s words, too, on the Spirit World – that the Cyl would find their answers there. And she hoped he was right about that, but wrong about fate.
The Earth & The Wind
The light faded and Evie was floating. The water was cold but she felt only warmth, and through everything – through the water, through the air, through her body, through her mind – there was music.
As far as she could see – to an endless horizon – it was only water, and music was the only sound. It soothed her and eased her, until she was no longer conscious of her own body or her thoughts – just the warmth of the cold water and the melody that seemed to come from inside and outside at once.
It felt like a place she could stay forever. She closed her eyes – seeing the water now with her mind as clearly as she had with her eyes, and feeling the music rise until it filled every part of her reality.
It was beautiful, it was peaceful – but it was not her place. The thought suddenly burst in and music turned to silence. The water dropped and vanished, as though some vast sink hole had opened below her. And Evie found herself nowhere.
All sense of being was gone – it was not the absence of anything, it was the overwhelming presence of nothing. Then – something. A thought, but not her own.
‘Evie!’ It came from within her but it was not her voice.
‘Who is it?’ Now it was her voice – but from the same place.
She was not hearing someone as much as she was being someone – her mind, her thoughts, were indistinguishable from those of the other. And the other was now her.
‘Where do I go?’ ‘Where are you?’ ‘I’m here, where are you?’
Then, in an instant, the other was separate again and Evie was looking at a face she knew.
‘Aldrwyn?’
‘Evie – you’ve come.’
Evie reached to touch him, but the space between them seemed to stretch back exactly as she put out her arm.
‘Where have I come?’ she asked.
‘To help me choose,’ Aldrwyn smiled.
‘What are you choosing?’
‘The water, or the music.’
‘Which do you want most?’ Evie asked.
‘I’m not sure. The music is soothing, it eases my pain – takes away everything. I can just listen and never feel pain or sorrow again.’
‘And the water?’
‘It’s cold. It chills me and cuts me when I swim. It’s lost its warmth.’
Evie looked at him a moment as he shivered, and hard beads of sweat broke out on his forehead and neck. ‘It sounds like you want the music, Aldrwyn. Could the water keep you?’
‘Something in the water is calling me Evie. I know if I stay in it I will feel pain and if I go to the music the pain will go.’
‘But…’ Evie prompted the word for him.
‘But, under the pain is something else, something warm and something I still want. I so much want to rest in the music, but I feel like I still need to swim – just a little more, just to see if I can find that warmth again. I miss it so much.’
Evie watched him for a while. It was just her and him, all else was nothing.
‘I can’t decide for you Aldrwyn. It’s not my choice, it can’t be my choice.’
‘But if it was?’ Aldrwyn entreated.
‘You need to listen to your own voice now. It must be you.’
And Aldrwyn vanished. Evie was in the wood at Uish, lying among the leaves and forest litter where she had conjured her pictures months before.
The sensation ran through her once more – the burning of the magic as it ran in her blood. The force of it pushing against her body and her mind, calling louder and louder for release. But this time she could not let it go. There was no release, just the endless ache of pressure on pressure as she pleaded for the energy to spark to ground and free her.
The leaves and twigs around her began to rise and circle, forming shapes, then a moving picture as they had before. But the picture was more real than any she had drawn with magic.
A shape she knew began to form, a centre of broken twigs and lichen, from which leaves spiralled out to make a face that had no solid form but the movement of green and brown. More and more leaves, moss, branches and soil rose from the ground until its full form appeared – a towering figure shaped from the earth itself loomed above her, observing her.
‘Who are you?’ Evie called out. But the figure remained silent, watching.
The trees of the forest began to shake – slightly at first, then more violently, waving frantically, then straining and moaning until the tops were bending down near to horizontal.
The wind whipped up more leaves and sucked the water from the ground so that it rose into a spiral. Now Evie was back in water – the water and the wind whipping around her in a soaking whirlwind that lifted her into the air. Within the curtain of water she saw another face – a face of dew and mist, so faint that it came and went too quickly for her to take in its form. Then she dropped.
It felt like she fell forever, but she hit the ground with no pain and was back on the forest floor among the leaf litter and mosses. The man of leaves and wood was standing over her again, now as big as the oldest oak. His hand stretched out towards her – a huge canopy of leaves and branches – and came down to cover her. She crouched, anticipating the crush of its enormous weight – then she fell into blackness and nothing.
* * *
Cran Dy. In the language of the old Cyl it means Fort of the Clouds. Its name is well deserved, as, at the western edge of the Western Mountains, it pulls down the vast plumes of moisture that blow in from the great ocean, so that it’s top is rarely visible from the valley below.
And on those days when the wind changes its mood and sweeps in suddenly from the cold east, it can lift the wet, warm air of the valley up, cooling as it rises, so that the clouds from the hill
above and the clouds from the valley below rush to embrace and hold the whole mountainside in their grip.
And now, as the thousands-strong army pounded their heavy legs up the slope towards the waiting hundreds, it was not the Cyl army they saw coming down to meet them, but the warrior of Cran Dy herself – the mountain cloud. And behind them, catching them as fast, was the ghost of the mere – the valley fog.
All magic kin have different gifts. The Nix are attuned to music and water, the Daw to nature. The Cyl belong to the mountains.
They see paths where others see only bog, they read rain and they taste wind. They cross narrow mountain ridgeways by feel alone, and hear their way home in the dark. And they can fight in the clouds.
The Sea People warriors were in confusion. The fog was now so thick they could barely see the ends of their spears as they blindly prodded forward with them, trying to measure the ground.
The Cyl fell on them. The great horns sounded so that it seemed the spirits themselves were howling as the first blades bit. In the blinding mists, the Cyl sensed their enemy, they felt their shapes, they smelt their fear.
The panicked Sea People lashed out with sword and spear, but at best they hit air, at worst they hit their comrade beside them. The confusion, the screams, the biting of knives and spears against the flailing of useless weapons, made it seem as though 10,000 angry Cyl had pulled themselves up from the depths of the swamps to swarm on their ranks and cut them down.
A soldier who believes in the Reborn King, who sees a leader taking him on the path to glory and gold, who knows what he is fighting for, will fight until the end to honour his oaths.
A soldier in a failing battle, shorn of gold and land, a thousand miles from home in the wet and fog of a miserable valley at the end of nowhere, surrounded by ghostly warriors who cut his comrades down as they scream blindly around him – he will do one thing. He will run.
And so they ran – many into the terrible grip of the valley marshes that pulled them down to the wet, airless underworld. Others to the ways where a blind step forward took them down to the crushing rocks and thorns of a gully floor. But most back over the mountain, back to their camp, back to the road home.
