The Fiuri Realms (Shioni of Sheba Book 5) (5 page)

Into that silence, Shioni whispered, “Imagine standing inside an enormous cave, like this one, but there’s no light. Everything is dark. The silence is so deep and still, all you can hear is your own breathing. But the darkness isn’t scary. It’s as velvety as the inside of a hammock flower. You realise the darkness isn’t truly dark, because up there, so far above you that you can’t even imagine the distance, there are tiny lights, as if crystal dust were scattered in the darkness. Each light twinkles at you. Each one has a name.”

S
Hioni, Cosily Cocooned
in a hammock flower, lay awake for a long time. Her friends had never seen stars. She had. All three Fiuri had cried after she described stars to them, even though she had explained that stars could only be seen from that forbidden place, the surface of Fiuriel. The place of wild magic. How could she have imagined that the idea of stars would so upset them?

Once, the Fiuri had lived in peace on the surface, but a terrible enemy had driven them down into the tunnels. Char had explained that those histories had been destroyed and forgotten. “No-one knows why the wild magic came,” he had explained. “The only hints I’ve found in my research speak of sky-fires and the deaths of many Fiuri. Can fires come from the sky, Shionelle?”

They spoke about lightning–but Shioni did not know what could have driven an entire magical Fiuri civilisation underground.

She stared at the leaf rolled about her, feeling warm and safe in body, and yet so lost she might as well have come from the stars herself. Why was she so different? How could she know these things? She couldn’t have lived on the surface, could she? No Fiuri could live up there. They trembled at the thought.

Even Fiuriel’s night was light. The hammock flower’s petals transmitted a small amount of light, so that the effect was similar to lying in a softly glowing cave. Despite her whirling thoughts, Shioni felt very sleepy. Was it just her imagination, or was the flower humming to her, a sound so deep she could sense a vibration more than hear it? She would welcome the forgetfulness of sleep. Maybe, in the morning, she’d remember everything and nothing would seem strange any more.

She awoke bursting to go to the toilet. Too much sweet water and nectar.

“Um, tickle, tickle,” she said, reaching up. To her surprise, the hammock flower unfurled immediately.

Rising, Shioni fluttered to the ground. She looked around for a good spot. Right. This would do nicely, and it was not far from the patch of hammock flowers. Viridelle had warned her about all the sleep time predators. Far too many creatures loved to slink around in the semi-darkness searching for morsels–little Fiuri being a prime dish, apparently. Shioni looked around nervously as she pulled her ridiculously oversized shorts up again and bunched them around her tiny waist. Ha. She wasn’t afraid. She would show her friends!

No sooner had this thought crossed her mind, than a loop of sticky thread dropped around her shoulders. Shioni yelped, took one look at her attacker, and screamed for real. The crystal spider was three times her height. With great cunning and speed, it wrapped its silken thread about her upper body, pinning her arms and wings. Its long, spindly legs worked furiously, spinning her around and around. She had no chance. The legs were too fast. Everywhere she turned, there was another leg and another loop of the super-sticky thread. When she was well and truly trussed, the spider reeled her up to its sickeningly soft underbelly. It darted away.

Cocoon spider! Shioni tried to remember what Viridelle had said about cocoon spiders. Weren’t they supposed to be shy? This one seemed anything but shy. It meant to eat her.

Suddenly, she remembered that she ought to be shouting for help.

“Help!” she wailed. “Someone help me, please!”

The spider whisked her up a tree to a macabre nest. Cocoons hung from the branches and leaves all around her. The dry, shrivelled remains had been left inside the cocoons. One or two looked quite fresh. They were not moving. Insects, perhaps? Viri had said that the cocoon spider sucked its victims dry.

Working at the same frenzied pace, the spider hung her from a branch by a thick thread spun from its spinnerets and proceeded to wrap her up even further, layer upon layer of thread all the way down to her toes, until she resembled a pupa dangling from the tree.

Shioni drew a deep breath. “Get lost, you blood-sucking fiend!” she shouted. The spider vanished into the leaves above her. “Viri! Chardal! Someone, anyone!”

Wriggling was useless. Her hands were stuck so tightly that she could barely budge a finger. Even her toes had been trussed. Only magic would help her now. A shame she had none. Shioni tried to imagine the silken thread melting, or burning, or becoming non-sticky and falling off, but nothing happened. Just her luck, she thought. Two sticky traps in two days. She was becoming quite the expert.

“Iridelle!”

Shioni kept calling and calling, until her voice grew hoarse. The spider stayed away–for now, at least. She dreaded to think what might happen if she fell asleep or if the others could not find her. She tried not to imagine what might have been inside those other cocoons.

“Shionelle? Little petal, where are you?” came a faraway call.

“Iri! Over here!” To her embarrassment, Shioni began to sob with relief. “I’m stuck up a tree!”

Shortly, she caught sight of the familiar green wings of her friends through the leaves. When they realised her predicament, Viri started laughing, Iri came straight to help her, and Chardal just shook his head in bemusement.

Iridelle sawed at the silk with her belt knife. “Great caterpillars, this thread’s tough!”

“What did I tell you about not getting out of your hammock flower on your own?” Viridelle folded her arms and waggled her antennae simultaneously. “You’re lucky it was only a cocoon spider, Shionelle. How many times do I need to tell you that Fiuriel’s a dangerous place for us Fiuri?”

“Clearly, once more than you did,” said Iridelle, not helping matters.

“I had to go water a bush,” said Shioni. “I was desperate, Viri.”

“Right,” huffed Viri. “Repeat after me. Fiuriel is dangerous. I will do as I am told. I will listen to that nice Green Hunter who is only trying to keep me alive.”

Shioni waggled her tongue at Viri.

“Great caves, you rude–
right!
” Viridelle fluttered over to Shioni. “You need to learn your lesson, Fiuri, starting right now. I’m a mean Hunter. Are you ticklish?”

“No …”

“Not over here?”

Shioni squirmed helplessly as Viri tickled her neck. “Hey! Stop it!” Cocooned as she was, she could do nothing to stop the attack. Between shouts of laughter, she cried, “Viri–oh, not the antennae, Viri, oh, that’s just weird. Stop, please.”

“Repeat my lesson,” said the Hunter. “No? Tickle, tickle.”

“You beast! I’m stuck in this stupid cocoon–Iri, please. I can’t stand it!
Heeeelp!
”

She could not remember being ticklish before, but she certainly was, now. Viridelle was horrid. She would not let up, enjoying playing the torturer! No amount of wriggling, pleading or shouting on Shioni’s part made her relent. And the other two just hovered there, enjoying her predicament! Shioni was so maddened, a crimson mist descended over her eyes. A tingling began in her wings and antennae. Her stomach burned. Suddenly, a strange force burst out of her body, as if her skin had punched outwards. The cocoon disintegrated and Shioni fell almost to the ground before catching herself with her wings.

Startled, she cried, “Viri! You beast, I’m going to
get
you!”

She zoomed upward as though shot by a catapult. Shioni’s eyes flew wide in surprise. Flinging out her hands to stop herself from crashing into Viridelle, she only succeeded in punching her in the eye.

“Oh, monkey poo–ouch!” Shioni drifted off, staring at Viri in surprise. “You hit me.”

The Green Hunter shouted furiously, “You hit me first!”

“I didn’t mean to …”

“What’s monkey poo?” asked Char, whipping out his quill pen.

Viridelle was about to yell at him too, when Iridelle snagged her sister by the left wing and Shioni by the seat of her shorts and pulled them apart. “Children!” she snapped. “It was an accident.”

Shioni touched her newly bruised right cheekbone, surprised to discover she was not bleeding. Viri screwed up her left eye. “She does have magic, by my wings,” she griped. “Did you see that? She destroyed the cocoon and then attacked me like a maddened Beater-Wasp.”

“I didn’t attack–”

“Magic? What kind?” Char interrupted.

“Whatever turns spider silk into a pile of ash,” said Viri, crossing her arms triumphantly. “Or launches her like a rocket flower.” But her smirk faded as Char’s puzzlement did not lessen. “What? It’s not magic, Char?”

“No kind of magic I’ve ever heard of or read about,” he said.

Shioni gulped. “Don’t you start looking at me like you want to dissect me, Char.”

“By the first pupa, it’s a puzzle,” he said, stroking the tiny bit of fuzz on his chin he liked to call a beard. He muttered at a terrific pace, “A White Fiuri with no magic and no colour who evidently does have magic, just a different kind of magic that nobody has ever seen before which can disintegrate a physical substance at a touch and I can’t pin it to any particular kind of magic whether it be green or blue or red or even terrible black …”

“I know!” cried Iridelle.

“Oh, you can work it out when
scholar
Chardal over there has never heard of it?”

Shioni gasped as Viri’s spiteful sneer made tears start in her sister’s eyes. “I’s never heard such a load of old caterpillar droppings!” Shioni cried, and then blinked in surprise. Who did she know who talked like that? “Iridelle, I want to hear your idea.”

“Um …” sniffed Iridelle.

Viri crossed her arms and looked the other way.

Glaring at the Hunter, Shioni said, “Go on, Iridelle.”

“Well, I thought–it’s silly nectar, really–but you know, white isn’t actually no colour. It’s all colours. And I was just wondering … I mean, I know it’s a right-out-of-the-tunnel idea … but I couldn’t help but wonder if you weren’t some kind of all-colour Fiuri. Maybe. Sort of. Possibly.”

“Wow,” Shioni breathed.

Viridelle’s shoulders shook. If she had laughed just then, Shioni decided crossly, she would have kicked her antennae all the way back to wherever Cave One might be. But a glance at Chardal made her snort with laughter, too. The boy-Fiuri was so amazed that his tongue had completely unfurled and hung down to his chest like a wilted flower. He could not even speak. Had he sat firmly on a Spiny-Spike flower, he could have looked no less thunderstruck.

The silence deepened around them.

“By the first pupa!” screamed Chardal, making them all jump. He zipped off at high speed, flying in crazy somersaults and double backward loops and endless spirals, laughing to himself, spilling books and ink pots and quill pens in every direction.

Iridelle’s eyes had never been wider. “What did I say?”

“He’s been in the wobbly nectar,” said Viridelle, still irritable. “Bounced off the cave wall a few too many times.”

Chardal came zooming back through a tall stand of purple polka flowers, still burbling all sorts of nonsense. Iridelle, caught holding Shioni in one hand and Viri in the other, had no defence as he threw his arms around her neck and dropped a dozen slobbery kisses on her cheeks before whizzing off in yet another direction, yelling, “Brilliant! What a simply scintillating idea!”

Iridelle dropped her captives to wipe her cheeks. “Ew.”

Shioni clutched Viridelle’s arm. “Viri, you owe your sister an apology.”

The Hunter tried to shake her off. “This is between us, Shionelle. Go find another flower.”

“Right.” Gripping Viri by her left antenna, Shioni gritted out, “You will apologise right now or I am going to thrash your Green Hunter behind–”

“
Yeeow!
” howled the Fiuri. “You little pest!”

Dodging Viri’s swipe, Shioni flipped the other Fiuri onto her back and applied a stranglehold to her neck, using the crystal cast on her arm to good effect. In seconds, Viridelle was gasping for air. Again, Shioni was startled to discover what her body knew how to do. Viri tapped her hands three times.

Iridelle’s large hand trapped Shioni’s wrists. “She submits, Shionelle.”

Shioni released her hold. “Er–sorry, Viri.”

To her surprise, Viri made an unfamiliar sign with her fingers. “This Hunter admits her error. Shionelle, you were right to correct me. Iridelle, I’m sorry for what I said. I was wrong to take it out on you.”

Iridelle enveloped her twin in a huge hug and rubbed antennae with her. Over her sister’s back, she beckoned to Shioni, who gingerly joined them. What was this? All was forgiven because she had nearly strangled Viridelle? What a pile of old hyena droppings! Oh, she did not understand the first thing about Fiuriel. The sooner her memory returned, the better.

Viridelle put her arm around Shioni’s shoulders and ruffled her hair, which she bristled at. “A bit of the Hunter’s courage in you, eh? I like you, little White Fiuri. You’ve earned my respect.”

Mad. They were all quite mad.