Skyfire (4 page)

We run.

The world is a blur of leaves and mud, dust and shadow. Bare branches thwack my face and outstretched hands. I stumble and curse and stagger onwards, my breath like a chorus of shrieks in my throat. No time to worry about leaving a trail – not now, with a more urgent threat overhead.

Maisy trips, crashing with a gasp into a tangle of sharp branches. I whirl around and seize her arm, and a moment later Clementine is beside me. We haul Maisy to her feet, and I wince to see the slash of blood across her hand. She grits her teeth and waves us onwards.

‘I'm all right!' she gasps. ‘Go, go, go!'

I duck and weave and crash beneath the canopy,
the pang of a stitch in my side. I dart between trunks, slide under low branches and ignore the whiplash from twigs that Teddy shoves aside. My eyes are streaming, and my lungs heave with all the force of an alchemy bomb.

The foxhawk screeches again, and we lurch to the left.

‘We've got to –' Clementine's sentence chokes off as she slides beneath a bristling branch – ‘got to hide!'

‘Has it seen us?' I ask Lukas, my words as sharp as my breath. ‘Has it seen us, or is it just –'

Lukas closes his eyes. A sharp flash of concentration consumes his face, wrinkling his nose and eyebrows. Then he shakes his head. ‘Not yet. The rider's circling, looking for something …'

‘Us?'

‘How could anyone know about us?' Clementine shoves through a tangle of foliage. ‘It's just a coincidence, surely!'

I nod, hoping against hope that she's right. Perhaps this rider is looking for Tindra. Perhaps it's another enemy of hers, checking that she's really dead. Or perhaps it's a friend, or family, searching to save her. But if we're wrong …

Maisy grabs my arm. ‘Over there.'

To our right, the land curves down into a half-frozen ditch. Bristles spill over the top, curling
their tendrils towards the light. It looks like thicker foliage than here, and right now I'll take any advantage we can get.

The land slopes deeply into the shadows of the undergrowth. We drop to our bottoms and slide down. Thorns and prickles jab my flesh like needles, and I'm forced to use my hands to shield my face.

My mother's bracelet snags on a twig, but I manage to tug it free. I catch a glimpse of the silver charms that swing from its chain. Alchemy charms, imbued with slivers of dying souls' proclivities. A silver star, with the power to give starlight … and a tiny metal rose, with the power to mask our scents. We've used the rose once before, to hide ourselves from pursuing foxaries.

‘The rose charm!' I whisper. ‘Will it work on a foxhawk?'

Lukas shakes his head. ‘No point hiding our scent if it can see us. That thing might have a fox's head, but it's got the eyes of a hawk.'

And so all we can do is slide deeper into the dark. The thicket spikes around us, tight and sharp and unwelcoming, but its branches are dense enough to hide us from the sky.

There's a soft
whumph
to our left. We freeze. I meet the others' eyes for a moment: four pairs of terrified orbs.

Slowly, I turn my head. I try not to touch the bushes, to send the thistles quivering at the brush of my shoulders. I catch a glimpse through the prickles. It's an incomplete picture: a broken jigsaw, half-erased by leaves and thorns.

But it's enough to see the earth and trees. Enough to see the fur, the wings, the shining golden eye.

Foxhawk
.

The rider dismounts, his boots hitting the stony mud with a crack. About forty years old, I'd guess, with brown skin and piercing eyes. With a twist in my gut, I realise this isn't the man who shot Tindra. The killer wore a cloak of grey, while this man's cloak is blue. It's draped over drab trousers and a threadbare shirt. He looks thin and knobbly enough to be a tree himself, here in the scraggle of the woods.

He tilts his head to the side, listening. Beside me, I can sense the others' tensed bodies: the twist of their limbs, the tightness in their throats.

The foxhawk turns its own head, ever so slowly, towards our patch of undergrowth. Its eyes focus on us, unblinking beads of gold. And with a resolute expression, the man turns to follow its gaze.

I stare at him. He stares back. He hasn't seen us yet; we're hidden well in this nest of lines and shadows. But he knows we're here. He knows it, and any second now –

He draws his pistol.

If possible, my spine stiffens even more. Every cell in my body burns, strained tight enough to explode. My lungs throb from a lack of breath, but there's no helping it. Not when I'm staring down the barrel of a pistol. The gun winks at me, a sly little gleam in the dappled light.

‘Who's there?'

The man's accent is strange, like Tindra's. But his voice is deep and husky; strained by a childhood illness, perhaps, or by screams and shouts long forgotten. His finger curls upon the trigger. One little squeeze, and the alchemy will blast that bullet through my skull …

Lukas draws a sharp breath.

The foxhawk jerks backwards. Its wings flap open as a shriek escapes its mouth, and claws slice at the air in a sudden moment of panic. The gunman stumbles sideways, knocked aside by the blast of the creature's wings.

We run.

The prickles snare my clothes, tear at the fabric. They scratch stinging welts into my flesh, but all I can think about is the man with the gun, stumbling in the shock of his foxhawk's panic, and this precious chance to save ourselves …

Lukas looks dizzy, tripping a little as he runs. I yank his sleeve to jerk him back into reality. I want
to thank him – to tell him that it worked, that his magic saved my life – but part of his mind is still locked into the foxhawk's, and his legs move like they're made of porridge.

‘Come on!'

I yank Lukas forward again, and this time he snaps to attention. He blinks, glances around, and pales. And then we're all running, throwing ourselves down the edge of the ditch and up the other side – back up into rambling forest and sparse trees and chinks of broken light.

We lurch and dart, huff and gasp. Our bodies stream with sweat, even in the chill of the air. Our feet crunch, shattering twigs and husks of leaves. The whole world jerks, like a broken recording of a picture spell, as my strides grow longer and my gaze jolts up and down. A flash of sky, a flash of brown. Leaves, branches, the whiplash of air. A whirl of staccato leaps and breaths and panic until –

A flurry of wings. A crash of rumpled feathers and the furious shout of a man up ahead. We barrel into the next clearing, carried by our own momentum.

Bang!

Lukas throws out his arm to hold me back, and Clementine lets out a sharp cry at the sight of the foxhawk. The rider is puffing slightly, his eyes wide and the pistol smoking in his hands.

‘All right, folks – that was a warning shot! If you run again, I'll put the next one through one of your throats. Got it?'

It takes me a long moment to collect myself, but I manage to give a shaky nod.

‘Good.' The man steps forward, the pistol roaming between us. His muscles are strung as tightly as the anxious knot in my stomach. He finally settles on Teddy as a target. ‘Where are you from?'

Teddy hesitates. ‘Well …'

‘Don't lie to me, son. You're not from Víndurn.'

Víndurn
? Is that what this land is called? I roll the word in my mind, trying to fit its shape to the gnarled landscape.

Teddy looks at me, the question clear in his eyes. I meet his gaze for a moment, then nod. He can't bluff our way out of this one – not even the great Teddy Nort, pickpocket and conman extraordinaire. We have no knowledge of Víndurn. We have the wrong accents, the wrong dialect, the wrong clothes.

We have to tell the truth.

‘We're from Taladia,' Teddy says. ‘Other side of the Magnetic Valley.'

The man raises an eyebrow, but doesn't pull the trigger. I decide to count that as a hopeful sign.

‘We nicked off, you see,' Teddy says. ‘Wanted a better life, away from the king and that, so –'

‘Our king wanted to invade your land,' Clementine says. The words tumble out of her in a panic, fast and breathless. ‘We saved you. We blew up his airbase, and we flooded the catacombs, and we stopped him from –'

The man swings the pistol around to face her. Clementine shuts up with a nervous squeak.

‘You saved us?' The man's voice is as deep as gravel. ‘
You
saved
us
?'

Clementine doesn't respond. Her eyes are trans-fixed upon the pistol, as if a deadly viper is about to lunge for her face.

I step forward hastily, trying to draw the man's attention. ‘Sir, we didn't mean any disrespect.'

‘Oh?' the man says. His gaze doesn't waver from Clementine.

I adopt the humblest voice I can manage: the voice I always used when begging barkeepers for work in Rourton. ‘We just wanted to let you know Víndurn is in danger, sir. Our king is determined to invade and conquer your –'

The man's laugh echoes sharply. He turns to face me, his eyes as cold as frost. ‘Hate to break it to you, lass, but King Morrigan would have better luck munching a hornet's nest for supper. That way, he mightn't get stung so hard.'

I glance at the others again, startled. None of us has mentioned King Morrigan's name – yet this man
seems utterly familiar with it, as though details of Taladia's governance are common knowledge.

Back in Taladia, we knew nothing of the outside world. There were lands that the king was invading, and there was the land beyond the Valley. That was it.

Yet here we are, in a land of fables – and this stranger knows not only the name of our country, but our king. It feels oddly like being caught naked, while the rest of the world swans around in ball gowns and tuxedos.

The man readjusts his grip on the pistol. ‘You're not the first Taladians to come running here,' he says. ‘And you won't be the last.'

‘What are you going to do to us?' I say.

He raises an eyebrow. ‘I might be planning to shoot you, lass. Are you so keen to get it over with?'

I tense a little, but try to keep my expression neutral. ‘No, sir. It's just … we were told that your land was a welcoming place. Somewhere to be safe. We were hoping to find a new home.'

The man snorts. ‘Weren't we all?'

I frown, confused.

‘Here's the thing,' the man says, his finger still tight on the trigger. ‘I'm a migrant too. My parents brought me here as a boy, from the Borrolan Islands in the south.'

None of us responds. I shift my gaze subtly towards Maisy, trying to see if she looks familiar
with the name ‘Borrolan Islands'. But her eyes are wide and her lips are parted in surprise, so I guess her beloved encyclopaedias failed to mention any distant nations.

‘See, a lot of folks come to Víndurn,' the man says. ‘They hear the stories, and come here looking for a better life. People from the south, people from the east. People from the west,' he adds, with a nod towards us.

‘You all hear the same stories?' Lukas says. ‘In all these countries, you hear the rumours of Víndurn as a sanctuary?'

The man nods. There's something unreadable in his eyes now. ‘Most folks've got something to run from,' he says. ‘And Víndurn's willing to take them, see? Lord Farran's the one who seeds the stories. Sends the rumours out on the lips of travellers, to cross the seas and mountains and valleys.'

‘But why?' I survey the scraggly trees. ‘I mean, no offence, but this isn't exactly the paradise they talk about in the stories …'

‘Lord Farran needs workers,' the man says. ‘When he first came to Víndurn, this country had so few people – barely enough to build a proper nation. The land didn't even have a central ruler.' He gives a wry smile. ‘They say a giant could spit across Víndurn, and there'd be barely a soul to complain of the rain on his cheeks.'

‘But –'

‘Lord Farran wanted to build a strong country. A great country.' The man pauses. ‘And it's easier to lure folks here with promises, I'd say, than to strike out and abduct them from their homes.'

A cold little clench runs down my spine. I think suddenly of King Morrigan and his conscription for the army – of being forced into service at the age of eighteen. Have we fled from one life of slavery into another?

The man lowers his pistol. He looks around, then drops his voice, as though he's about to say something illicit. ‘If you've any chance of heading back, folks, I'd do it now.'

I blink.
Heading back?
Back into Taladia? After all we've endured: the deaths, the trauma, the snow and storms and wastelands and the horror of the catacombs …

No. It's impossible. King Morrigan's hunter is still behind us, and we have no hope of slipping back around him. Not on the bare expanse of the plains, where it's impossible to hide. Besides, even if we miraculously made it back to Taladia, there's still a price on our heads – and it's probably quadrupled since our assault on the king's airbase. Half the army will be on our trail. We'd be shot before we made it five kilometres.

‘We can't,' I say. ‘It's too dangerous. There's a
hunter behind us – and if he finds us, he'll kill us. We need your help.'

The man raises an eyebrow. ‘Upset your king, have you?'

‘Something like that.'

‘Well, then,' he says, holstering the pistol at his hip, ‘my name's Bastian, and I'm a firestone scout for my clan. And I'd say your best hope is to come with me.'

Firestone
. The word jerks a memory forward: Tindra's dying words, as she lay crumpled on the rocks.

I look at the others. We all share a moment of uncertainty, before the answer slips between us like a silent handshake. It's almost unnerving how well we understand each other now. My crew. My friends.