The Maloneys' Magical Weatherbox (22 page)

“Go on then. See you on the other side.”

“Yeah,” I said, and was carried away from her by a stampeding herd of Shieldsmen. I ran, dodging the flying legs and the masks and the stilts. Through the flapping kilts and thundering feet, a pale white shape slipped and dodged until she was beside me. Hazel grinned the sort of grin you grin when you've lost something you needed or loved and now you might as well make the best of carrying on without it. I grinned back, the sort of grin you grin when you're glad to have someone your own size along with you because you're surrounded by whooping muscled lunatics. We crashed along the forest path.

 

CHAPTER 24

LIZ

They ran into the woods and left us behind with the road full of smoking holes and covered in wrecked equipment, burning cars, a crashed truck, and a smashed Weatherbox.

It was very, very quiet.

“Mum,” I said.

Ed's truck gave a cough, and the engine turned, caught, and throbbed loudly.

“There we go!” Ed called, leaning out of the cab. “It'll take more than a few scratches to put her off the road! Who wants a lift?”

“I'll pay you,” Tony Holland said. “I'll pay you a thousand euros to get me out of here. Please.”

“Er, what about us?” asked Clive.

“Them, too, if they'll fit,” Tony said, gesturing to the other AtmoLabbers.

“You're not going anywhere!” said Mum. “If Ed's taking anyone it's Liz and Owen and Ash! They're children!”

“Oh, now you're worried about the children, are you, after sending your own son off into the woods with those head cases? Get into the truck, you lot.”

Ed jumped down in front of Tony.

“Nobody,” he said, “gets in my truck without my permission.”

“A thousand euros!” shouted Tony. “Two thousand!”

“Have you no shame?” yelled Mum.

I turned my back on the argument, feeling tired and sore and let down and left out. I gripped my bow and looked into the woods. I could dash in while no one was looking. I could catch up. I could be one of the Shieldsmen, fighting Hugh's monsters. Before the thought had finished crossing my mind I was leaning forward, ready to run, when I realized that someone had somehow got in front of me. Ash was staring into the woods, small and lost and alone, no bigger than Owen and delicate as a glass doll. Neetch padded up and rubbed against her ankle. Owen came up and leaned against me. I put my arm around his shoulder. It was dark now, despite the lights from the clouds.

“Cat,” Ash said, her voice fond and gentle and delicate. “Bad cat.”

She turned and blinked up at me. There was a cut on her forehead, a bruise on her cheek, and her dress was torn and muddy.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hi,” I said.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said, and it was true. I couldn't really go into the woods. That was Neil's fight.

The argument around the truck had died down. I heard them approaching, Ed's heavy steps hurrying cross the road.

“Ash? Is that you? Ash, are you OK? What happened? Where's Hazel?” he asked her.

“Silly Ed,” she said with a giggle. Then her face fell. “My bad sister hurt us, Ed. She did something to us. I can't remember. I'm trying, but it's hard. She broke us. She wants to take us back to the mountains and chain us down and make us sing and stir. Then, with the Weathergirl here, there'd be three of us again. I don't want to sing and stir a mean old black hole forever! Stop her, Ed! Stop her, cat! Stop her, Weathergirl!”

I stopped breathing. “What did you call me?”

“It's OK,” Ed said. “The Weatherman and Neil will stop her. Come with me, honey. You'll be warm in the truck.”

“Yeah,” Cherie said. “We gotta get you off this road.”

“They'll lose,” Ash said, sad and solemn. “Neil will never be Weatherman. She will, and then she'll do what she wants—to us and to you. They won't let Neil be Weatherman because they're too mad at the Weatherman. They don't care what she's like or what she's done to anybody else.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

She looked at me, utterly miserable. “I know lots of things. Lots and lots. But she's made me start to forget them all. They're all going away. I can't remember how to talk to flowers. I can't remember how to draw a song. I can't remember the shapes of the seven rocks. I can't remember my own name, my secret name. It's so hard, but I'm trying to remember just this: they will depose the Weatherman. They will reject his appointed heir out of rage at your father. They will accept my bad sister…” She grabbed my arm and whispered urgently, “Unless there's someone else, Weathergirl.”

“But why would they take m—why would they take anyone else, over her?” I demanded.

“Because they don't know what she's done to
them
!” she hissed. “My bad sister did something much worse than anything your father has done! Something that could make them forget how angry they are with him. But they don't know! She hid it! You hid it for her!”

I'd hidden her crime. All they knew was that the Seasons had failed to change, and that Dad had become Summer. He could tell them it was all Mrs. Fitzgerald's fault, but would they believe him? Would they listen? Would they care? There had to be proof of what she had done. There had to be someone to explain. There had to be a witness.

And there was. But I'd buried it in a bog for her.

“The Baby Season!” I exclaimed. “We've got to save the Baby Season.”

Ash put her tiny hand in mine. I looked back at Ed and Mum and AtmoLab. “Ed,” I said. “Bring the truck. Follow us.”

I started down the road, Ash holding one hand, Owen the other, and Neetch stalking ahead, tail waving. The air was thick, and a fog was creeping out of the trees.

We reached the Ditches at the same time as Ed pulled up in his truck. Mum was beside me, the AtmoLabbers trailing behind her and Tony Holland trailing behind them, complaining about his ear. Ed climbed down out of the truck, and we all stood on the verge of the road. The mist floated over the pools of water, lit up with the red and the green and the purple light from the Seasons. Reeds and ferns and tall grasses stood thin and sharp, and the willows drooped over secrets and shadows.

“Ed,” I said, “do you have a rope?

“Yeah, in the truck. I'll go get it.”

AtmoLab hung back a little, trying to listen in without getting in the way. Tony went over and sat down against the wheel of Ed's truck.

“What do you need a rope for?” Mum asked.

“We're going fishing for a Season,” I told her.

“Honey, is this the time? I know you want to get the poor thing out of there, but we really should be getting as far from here as we can until we hear from your dad that it's safe to come back.”

“This is the time,” said Ash. “It's a newborn Season. It's their child. If you save it, if you take it to them, they'll know what my bad sister did and she'll never be Weatherman. They'd scour this whole island to bare rock first. But the person who freed it, the Weathergirl who rescued it—oh, she, yes,
she
would be blessed above all others.”

Ed came back with a thick coil of blue rope. “This do?”

“Yeah. Good. Thanks. I think we could tie one end around the Baby Season and one end around the truck, and pull it out, couldn't we?”

Ed, Bob, Cherie, and Clive all looked at each other and then back at me.

“I've got a better idea,” Ed said.

“OK,” I replied with a shrug. “But we have to get on with it!”

Ed had a block and tackle in the truck. A block and tackle is, like, a big thick rope with a sort of metal hook on it, and there's this other metal bit with another rope, and it all looks like something you'd use to go fishing for the Loch Ness Monster. So I thought, fine, we'll drop the hook in the water with a bit of bait attached and the Baby Season will bite and we'll drag it up. “What bait do you use for Baby Seasons? Would a worm do?” I asked Ed. Ed said he didn't know, but the little hag girl did.

“Weathergirls,” she said. I pretended I hadn't heard her.

Everybody rushed and ran and worked together, quick and fast, and in only a few minutes Mum and Ed and Clive and Bob and Cherie were tying the bit they called the pulley to the trunk of a tree near the pool where the Baby Season had sunk. Or at least the one where I thought it had sunk. It was hard to be sure. I jumped around the grassy banks, splashing in the water and sinking down into the mud, while Owen and Ash and Neetch chased each other around and threw stones and sticks at the water, and Ash showed Owen how to weave little boats out of reeds and rushes.

Above us all were Summer Dad and Mrs. Fitzgerald, locked in battle, and the Seasons—huge flying towers of clouds and colors, each as wide as a city.

Ed pulled the rope through the pulley and tied it to the trunk of the tree.

The bog was eerie and strange and dark, shining with light but full of shadows, and all the pools that we used to think were just muddy ditches seemed deep and silent and sinister, with ribbons of fog floating over them. I jumped up and down and stamped my feet to work out my impatience. It all took only ten minutes, fifteen at the most, but it felt like hours were crawling by and the world was ending without us.

I tried to reach out to the Baby Season under the water. “Hold your breath. Close your eyes. Close your mouth. Don't be afraid. We're coming down. We'll get you out. We'll set you free, little baby thing, little baby thing way down in the dark.”

Tony Holland limped down from the road, moaning at everyone. He was holding a handkerchief to his ear. There wasn't even that much blood on it. “I could get an infection!” he whined. “I need a doctor. I need painkillers. Stop what you're doing! Stop! I'll fire the lot of you! Why are you helping these people? They shot me with an arrow!”

“They only did what we've wanted to do every day for the last two years, Tony,” Bob said.

Up the hill a bit, lightning suddenly flashed and winds blew, and branches snapped like matchsticks, as if there were some big mad bear charging through the woods chased by a thundercloud. Lights blazed and glowed and darted like they were alive, and gushes of wind and water exploded through the treetops.

“Hurry!” I said.

“Here we go,” Cherie said, putting a foot against the tree and pulling the last knot tight. Ed held the rope with the hook at the end, looking down into the pool.

“Now,” he said, “we'll just drop this down and hope it grabs hold, and then we pull it out, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Needs bait,” said the little girl hag, and I sighed.

“Yeah,” I said, and I took the hook and the rope out of Ed's hands, sucked in a deep breath, and jumped, feet first, down into the cold black waters of the bog.

 

CHAPTER 25

NEIL

The light under the trees was insane. All the raging colors of the Seasons flashed and flowed as they whirled around in a great, slow swirl, angry and impatient. A mist was rising, coming out of the ground and thickening between the trees. We had started to spread out a bit along the path.

“Stay together!” Weisz yelled.

Hazel ran beside me. I hoped her feet would be OK. I wouldn't have liked to run through misty woods in my bare feet. I wished I'd nipped into the house and got her a pair of Liz's old runners. She stumbled.

“Help me,” she said, and I reached out and we joined hands and ran together. There was some part of me that was saying, look, the world is ending and you are going to die, and a pale and night-haired girl with eyes as dark and deep as a shaded pool is holding your hand of her own free will and showing no sign of letting go. For God's sake, keep hold of that girl until the very crack of doom, because the end of the world and dying suck, but holding her hand doesn't.

We were moving fast and covering ground. Already, through the whiteness, I could see the main path that cut across the length of the wood up ahead.

“There!” I shouted. “We're nearly halfway to the wall!”

We leaped from the trees and over a small drainage ditch, onto the path. I slowed, searching the other side for the trail that would take us up the hill. Hazel's hand was still in mine, and she pulled me to a stop. The Shieldsmen spread across the path, their hands slightly out from their sides, their masks covering their faces, their bodies crouched. Things were moving in the fog. Hugh's elementals came down onto the path.

There was an explosion, a brilliant blue blaze of wild lightning. Crackling arcs of sizzling electricity reached for us. One of the Shieldsmen was blown back into the trees when an arc struck his chest.

And I thought,
Is this how it's going to be? Are they going to fight and maybe even die for me while I just duck and run? I'm supposed to be the Weatherman, now!

Weather, weather, weather rushed in at us from all sides. Bone-crunching blasts of air. Waves of rain that turned to ice and fell like knives. Forked arcs of blazing electricity.
Brilliant
! I thought.
Knives and forks!

The Shieldsmen were fast and bright and beautiful. They flung themselves at the elementals, flying and changing, growing into their long, sleek animal shapes, their claws and teeth shining through the fog and the ice.

I shut my eyes. I reached out with my mind. I left my body crouched behind a rock and saw the Shieldsmen and the elementals grapple and fight and slash. The Shieldsmen could duck and dive and dodge most of the things the elementals threw at them, and if they hit them right they could break them apart. But the elementals flew back together as fast as they were broken, and they were getting better and their aim was improving. They conjured a waterspout out of the air and froze it, and a thousand slivers of ice like nails lashed the Shieldsmen, leaving them cut and bleeding.