Firespark (35 page)

Stunned by sun, Tuck catapults back into the cave.

He thought the darkness was thinning, but after a season spent in deep night the last thing he expected when he turned the fifty-sixth tunnel bend was a dart of such eye-stinging sun.

Tuck rubs his shocked eyes. A galaxy of sunspots flashes in his head. Shading his face with one hand, the other gripping on to one of the rock spears sticking up from the cave floor, he peers around the very last bend.

Reels of copper light lie like metal rods across the waves in the fjord. The salt wind is in his face and Tuck's spirit soars as he stares at the sunlit sea.

His jaw drops. His heart beats hard. Tuck scrubs the wind-tears from his eyes and looks again, but the light has shifted and the vision, or whatever it was, has already passed.

Yet for a moment there, he saw the most astonishing thing.

The rods of sun, with the waves running through them, seemed to forge into a network. Tuck rubs his eyes again.
He knows it was only a trick of his salt-stung, sunstunned eyes but for an instant he'd swear, by the eyes of The Man he would, that what he just saw was the glint and weave of bridges.

Bridges, all across the water!

A hundred bridges! Linking the islets of the fjord.

That would beat his da's seventy-three. Tuck imagines the trademark Culpy crescent branded on every one.

What was that gypsea saying Ma would always nag at him with?

Take your father's windwrap and step out into the wind
.

Now he sees that Ma was only telling him to loot the best of what his da had given him and make it his own. If she'd nagged a bit less maybe he'd have listened to what she was trying to say. Well, now he understands.

Breathing heavy and hard, Tuck counts each of the looted and gifted treasures in the various pockets of his windwrap. The vision of the bridges is so strong in him, it's shaken him to his roots. Counting always calms him down.

He'd counted twelve thousand heartbeats trapped in the earthfall. There in the dark, Tuck suddenly knew why he has always counted out the world. It gives him a grip of things his weak eyes don't always reach—and a grip of the world when it feels beyond him.

Maybe now it's within his grasp. Maybe the
Arkiel
's sinking of
The Grimby Gray
opened up a gateway to the world he would never have had if he was still there with Ma.

Tuck fingers the pages of the book on natural engineering, the cold metal of the camera and the firebox, and the seven tiny moons that are Pendicle's pearls. There's the tiniest tingle in his fingertips when he touches the eggsmooth
surface of Mara's globe, with all the secrets of the past nesting inside. And he has his cutlass in its wire-woven scabbard, hanging from his belt.

He misses the smooth glass of Grumpa's three-cornered mirror. It fitted snug and sharp into the crease of his palm. That's gone with Mara, along with a broken piece of his heart. He's got her globe so they're quits, he supposes, though Urth knows he didn't mean to loot it; he was always going to give it back. But he can't now that there are mountains between them and a landslide of fallen rocks.

The pirate in him was snuffed out somewhere deep inside Earth. There wasn't too much to snuff out. He's not enough of a pirate to beat the things that make him quake. Things like ice tunnels and unsalty air and the inside of Earth.

He can't be a gypsea now either because he's Landed.

So who am I? What am I now
?

The beautiful vision of the bridges glistens in his mind's keep-pocket, beside his memory of the gem that is the Earth. Tuck limps out of the cave mouth and climbs down onto the rocky shore. He lets the salt wind gust through him, overcome with a sharp joy just to be on the outside of Earth once again.

A huge sky billows above the ocean, stacked high with night clouds. The sun has died behind the mountains of Ilira but it'll be back—Tuck is almost certain it will—at the other side of night.

He tugs his windwrap around the warm clothes he took from the caves. The salty gusts blow the dust of the Earth from its folds. He remembered who the windwrap once belonged to when he was tunneling through the earthfall in the mountain, with an instinct that he never
knew he had. It's the windwrap of one of the best bridge-builders Pomperoy has ever known.

In the faded blue windwrap that was his father's, with pockets full of treasure, Tuck limps into the wind and heads for Ilira.

The place of fearful awe.

Iceberg ships and castles sail the interior sea under a vivid sundown sky.

So vast is the water that the mountains on the farthest shores can't be seen. If it wasn't for the air, sharp as glass without a tang of salt, Mara would believe that the rolling waves belong to the ocean, not a lake cupped in the middle of land.

“Trees,” whispers Mol. “I can smell them on the wind. I'm sure I do. Can't we go to the trees?”

Ibrox has already sparked a meager fire in a shelter of rocks, and Mara hardly has the energy to move. Mol has taken Wing's telescope to scan the shores of the lake.

“There!” She thrusts the telescope at the others. “Look over there!”

The trees of a young forest hunch together in a valley that leads down to the interior sea. Thick, dark, arrow-shaped trees bend in the wind over a scattering of bare silvery ones. The mountains on either side lean over them like austere parents.

“Where there are trees, there are birds and animals,” says Possil.

“Food,” says Pollock, in case anyone misunderstands.

“It'll be more sheltered there,” says Fir. She pulls Tron's arm around her. “I want to be
warm
again. I miss the hot spring.”

“The fire,” shouts Ibrox. “I need something to burn. First things first.”

“This
is
the first thing,” snaps Mol. She's gray with tiredness and her eyes keep blurring with tears, Mara sees, and knows it's because they've made it here but Tuck has not. But still, Mol won't let up on the trees.

“Who are we if we're not Treenesters anymore? Who are we now?” she demands.

“This must be the land I dreamed of on the ship, only I never imagined a place so … so …” Gorbals stares out at the darkening lake. For once, he doesn't have words for what he sees. “This is the land of Mara.”

“So we're Marans now,” says young Clyde. “Not Treenesters.”

Mara has to laugh.

“We sound like aliens. I think I'll stay a Longhoper.”

“It
looks
like another planet,” says Rowan. “Or the moon.”

Ice has sculpted the mountains into infinite strangeness: chaotic cathedrals of stone. A frenzy of spires and turrets, worm-eaten lattices of rock, snow-packed crevasses, and vicious, staccato peaks. The great spire of rock that looms high above them points to the Star of the North, just as the narwhal horns did in the ocean. The lake, full of fallen starfire, is like the crumpled silver litter the urchins hoarded in the caves. A silver moon peeks over a crag of mountain and blows the North Wind across the waves.

“Can you walk, Mara? Could you make it down there?”

Mara nods. She's more exhausted and sore than she ever thought possible but she's as anxious as everyone else to find shelter from the bitter wind. And though there were none on her island and she was only a Treenester for a short time in the netherworld, the green patch of trees make her feel she is home, at last.

More than anything, she wants a home for her baby.

The baby snuggles against her skin and a beam of happiness surges through her, as pure as a shot of sun; but the flash of joy is spiked by grief so sharp that Mara has to push the pain deep inside, where she has put the grief for those other losses that are too painful to bear.

Fox is not here to see the miracle they've made. She is the lucky one. Mara looks down at her little miracle, tucked tight and safe against her, and the love that sweeps through her is as intense and frightening as the pain of her baby's birth.

“I never saw Broomielaw or Clayslaps in my dream like I said I did.” Gorbals looks as if it's a secret he can no longer bear to keep to himself. “I lied. They were never meant to be here, were they, or they would have been in my dream.”

Mara glances at his face as he helps her over a spur of rock. She remembers the moment of hesitation when he first told of the dream and squeezes his hand. It doesn't make her own pain any easier but she's not the only one who has lost the person they love.

It's hard to look at Mol and see her pain because then she has to think of Tuck, who wouldn't be dead and neither would his mother, if Mara hadn't crashed into their lives. But even that can't ease her devastation, her disbelieving fury, at his theft of the globe.

*

Life has fastened itself into the most unlikely nooks and crannies all over the Earth. Mara looks at a shrub that seems to be growing out of a cleft in sheer rock. She thinks of the lichen they found in the bleak glacier gorge and remembers the netherworld ruins, alive with insects and creatures and herbs and weeds. She thinks of Fox in his tower there and wills him her love on the wings of the wind.

In this small nook of forest, Mara vows, they will root themselves to the Earth and make a life at the top of the world.

In the shelter of the trees, they fall asleep around a crackling fire, hardly able to believe they are here. When light trickles through the trees a bird flies out of the branches above them, singing a song of impossible joy.

The baby rouses with sharp, hungry cries.

“What will you call her?” Fir asks, stroking the baby's cheek as she feeds from Mara. “She's as soft as a new leaf.”

“Or a flower.” Mara winces at the force of her baby's hunger but she can't stop breaking into a smile every time she looks down at the perfection of the tiny face. “I'm calling her Lily. For Candleriggs.”

“Lily Longhope.” Gorbals smiles. “It's a good name.”

“You're not Longhope, you're Mara Bell,” says Rowan.

“Longhope's my placename,” Mara explains.

“The name of your farm on Wing.” Rowan still looks puzzled.

“It's a Treenester thing,” says Mara, but she takes his point. “She can be Lily Bell Longhope then.”

“Better,” says Rowan. “But what about …?”

Mara's face tells him not to mention Fox.

“She has his looks so she can have my name,” Mara says in a voice that's brusque to stop her brimming into tears.

Rowan hesitates, as if he's searching for just the right words. He touches the baby's hand and her fingers open like a star. Then she closes her hand tight around his thumb. “She can have all of my love and care. Always.” His voice trembles.

And that does it. Mara's tears brim and fall on the baby's fox-tawny head and onto the earthy roots of the trees.

Mara rocks her baby asleep to a rhythm her body seems always to have known. She can't stop gazing at the tiny face. As long as she has Lily she will never be alone in the world. The future seems ever more precarious now that this precious mite depends on her for survival, and yet Mara feels a fluttering joy as she thinks of all the things they will do together in the years ahead. And there is so much she must tell Lily, one day.

In the shelter of a tree Rowan is busy with a pile of fallen branches. Mara walks across the carpet of needles cast by the trees and looks over his shoulder. He is weaving a large basket. After a while, he sets it down and tests it on the ground. He throws a quick smile at Mara and now she sees what it is: a rocking nest for Lily.

“Bit wobbly,” he decides and begins to weave some more.

As she watches his hands working the wood, Mara thinks of old Tain and his driftwood carvings that were famed all over Wing. She pictures her father mending his fishing boat with scraps of driftwood alongside the other island men on the shore. And she remembers her mother rocking her to sleep just as she rocks Lily, with the slow sway of a summer sea.

What she and Rowan are becoming, Mara is not sure. His familiar presence anchors her where Fox was like an
electric storm. He ripped through her life and is scorched into her soul as surely as the snake is branded on her arm. And he is burned into her future through Lily.

Mara remembers how she and Rowan grew up as close as two saplings in this forest of young trees. They sprang from the same patch of Earth; their roots are entwined. And Rowan is still here, alive, in her world. Sunbeams flicker through the branches and land upon the cradle-nest in his hands. The wind ruffles his hair, the same deep, burnished blond as her father's and so many of her island people. He glances up, sensing her gaze, and the look in his blue eyes stirs up a sensation that takes her by surprise, as if a hot spring has burst through the hard grief inside. Mara holds on to his gaze, and the feeling. And she wonders.

Might she and Rowan salvage a future, together, out of the wreckage of their past?