One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries (26 page)

I did not breathe, did not weep or sigh. I remained as still as I could, thinking cold thoughts, even when the dog ran to me, barking and slobbering. I knew that the old sand-fairy’s hot breath would render me into nothing but water on the ground.

Kill me, then,
I thought.
Let me melt.
 

After a moment of gazing at me with his huge, limpid snail’s eyes, the sand-fairy huffed and muttered to himself. “No life in this one,” he said. “It is only ice. Come, let us call the unicorns and to battle.”

I waited, still and unbreathing as the intruders left the room. Finally, I heard their merry voices from below as they left the house, planning aloud who would ride upon whose back, on their way to join the battle and kill my mother.

These children who styled themselves kings and queens, they would be back, naming the house their own. Or else the sand-fairy himself would take up residence. I stared at the sand scattered on the floor, all heat and grit.

My mother would lose the battle. How could she not, with all of this wretched sand spilling across the ground outside, the summer sun in the sky and hot magics in the air? Four children, a sand-fairy and a dog, all straight from the pages of the books she froze hard to her library shelves. Of course they would win.

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I left the house, the courtyard now empty of statues, and did not look back as I ran into the forest, hoping that I ran far from the battle and not into it. Surely I would find one last patch of winter snow to keep me safe. One frosted branch, one spindly icicle or stalactite.

Where the snow melted, there was nothing but sand, everywhere.

My tears froze before they touched my cheeks and hands — I was still ice, all the way to my core. The sand-fairy had said so.

I ran until the trees ended and the lamp-posts began: an endless expanse of cold iron poles twisted into beautiful shapes: lanterns lined up across the Waste. My mother had made this forest of metal, when she first stepped into this land and began her work, turning sand into ice and snow. She planted fragments from another world into the earth, and watched it grow and seed itself.

The lamp-posts, I thought, must come from the same world as the horrid children, and the books on my mother’s library shelves. A world of ginger beer and glacé cherries, of train timetables and boarding school, of hols and ices and tins of pineapple.

There was snow in that world. There had to be, or the entire Chalet School series made no sense. Perhaps I could find a home there, if I could only discover which of a thousand lamp-posts was the one that led the way to the cupboard beneath the stairs that was found at the beginning and end of every Secret Five book.

This desert of kings and queens and centaurs and fairies had nothing to offer me now.

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They killed my mother. I knew the moment when this happened, because my heart broke into pieces, slipping and sliding inside my ribcage. The pieces did not melt, but only because I pressed my hands to my chest and begged them to stay cold, to be ice and snow. I no longer breathed, and there was no pulse in my veins, but I still walked on cracking knees and aching limbs beneath the iron curves of the lamp-post forest.

The sky grew dark, and the lanterns sprang alight, every one of them. I laid my hand against one iron stem and left frosted fingertips there.

I staggered on, deeper into the maze of lamp-posts, and only now did I cry for my mother instead of myself. Drops of ice fell from my eyes and melted on the damp sand at my feet.

Ice, ice, ice.
I called up everything I knew about my mother and her powers. I called the winter and the snow. Not into the world, which was too big for me to change, but into my own veins.
If not snow, let me be stone.
 

Let me be a statue until winter comes again
.
 

And so, in a final breath of my mother’s magic, that is what I became.

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Time passed, and as a statue I knew none of it. The last of the snow melted from the land, to be replaced by hot sands and fierce winds. There were no more winters.

I might have stayed that way forever, but for a single cool breeze that whipped around my ears, and melted my hard limbs for a moment. I heard voices, laughter on the wind, and I awoke.

They did not see me, the kings and queens. They were older now, wrapped up in silken robes and burnooses, seated upon camels. I wondered what had happened to the reindeer. Perhaps they were the statues now.

I watched as they called to each other, setting up a colourful tent to shield their blistered and sunburnt skin from the fierce sun above. Roger was the eldest, the one who had always been brave, and Cyril was the younger boy, the one who had betrayed them all to my mother, but was then forgiven. He appeared to be growing a moustache, which curled at both ends.

The girl with short hair was no more minded to dress as a lady now that she was old, and she wore a bright turban upon her short dark curls. Hilary, they called her, which was as good a name for a king as a queen. She lifted the now elderly and wheezing dog out of her saddlebag, and gave him water. He sweated horribly, and smelled like camel.

“
Sand gets everywhere,” said Roger irritably, and quarreled with his younger sister Anthea about whether they should drink hot tea with milk or lemon on such “a beastly day”.

“
I miss rain,” said Cyril in a quieter voice. “Do you remember what it was like, just before we fell through the cupboard beneath the stairs? We thought it horrid, that we couldn’t play outside. Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a spot of rain now!”

“
They are predicting there will be no crops this year,” said Anthea, unpacking the picnic. “I say, does anyone want some Turkish Delight? There’s a whole box of it.”

All of the kings and queens made dreadful faces at their sister.

“
Give it to Champion,” said Roger in distaste.

The dog gave them all a long-suffering look.

“
It was around here somewhere, wasn’t it?” said Cyril, leaping to his feet. “Don’t you remember? All these lamp-posts. There was a large snow drift, and we fell…”

“
No snow now, you fool,” said Hilary.

“
I wonder how the war turned out,” said Roger. “The other war, I mean. Back home. If it lasted four years, I would have gone myself.”

“
We did fight a war,” said Cyril crossly. “Swords and all! Don’t you remember? Surely that business with the witch and the sand-fairy was war enough for anyone.”

Anthea burst into tears. “Do you remember what our mother looked like? I don’t think I do.”

I wanted to hate them, the four monsters who had killed my mother and destroyed my world. But for all their long limbs and curly moustaches, the Secret Five were still children at heart.

Then they were out of the tent, groping through the dust, looking around every lamp-post and rock, searching for that wooden door of theirs. Even the dog joined them, his head bowed against the fierce sun. Finally, he yapped.

“
Here!” said Hilary. “Oh, good boy, Champion. I can smell mothballs.”

“
I smell roast dinner,” said Roger. “And rain.”

“
You don’t think,” said Anthea. “Oh, you don’t think, do you, that it might be the very same day that we left?”

Then they were gone, all of them. Champion went first, worming into a hole in the ground barely large enough to let him through, and then the girls after him, pushing and giggling and gasping with hope.

Cyril was the last to leave. He stood there in his silken finery, gazing around at the forest of lamp-posts. His eye settled for a moment on me, on what he thought was a stone statue. I thought for a moment that he smiled beneath that ridiculous upper lip of his, and then he was gone too, scrabbling his way through into his storybook world.

Mothballs and rain. I smelled them too.

No more kings and queens.

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Was it my destiny now to return to my mother’s house, to take up her crown, and to make the winter come again? To give snow and ice back to the land, to banish the hot sand one last time?

I could do it. I knew that I could. I saw exactly how to draw on the old powers and become that which I had always feared. I could shape myself into the new Frost Witch, and there would be no kings and queens to stop me.

But oh, the smell of mothballs and rain.

If they could have storybook adventures in other worlds, these awful children, why could I not do the same? I could have
Kaffee und Kuchen
at the Chalet School, or play lacrosse at Malory Towers. I could befriend a bear at Paddington Station, and drink bottled lemonade in a rowing boat.
 

Couldn’t I?

Reader, I followed them. I dug a hole in the sand, let it swallow me whole, and fell through to a small triangular room full of spiders and coats. The cupboard under the stairs. I climbed out of there and found myself in a hallway, surrounded by staircases and the echoing voices of the children as they ran every which way through the house, celebrating their return.

On unsteady legs, I found my way to a window and watched rain gush down across a bright green lawn. Such wetness, cleaning the world anew. Eventually, the rain slowed and stopped, and still I stared at the gleaming, sodden grass.

My feet hurt. I was real, and this world was real, and my mother would never find me here, not in a thousand years of searching.

My mother was dead.

My tears were salt water falling on the backs of my pink, pink hands. I had never tasted such salt before. But this world was full of tastes and smells, of peppermint and floor polish, of damp walls and bread rolls baking in an oven. So many possibilities for adventure.

I breathed warm, damp air into my fleshy lungs.

And life began.

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“
C
ome
here, Sun-fire.” Druaric offered his hand, helping me off the bed, strangely gentle now the deed was done.
Sun-fire
was what they called me because I would not give them my true-name. They might have power over my body, but I wasn’t giving them power over my soul. As a Wyrding-woman in training, I knew that much.
 

The three brothers escorted me to the great hall. Lohnan, the eldest took my right arm, Murtahg took my left and Druaric limped along behind. He was the youngest, the clever one who listened when their Wyrding-woman spoke. Marked by a clubfoot, if he’d been born a girl, he would have walked the Wyrding-ways.

First we passed the slaves and the household servants who all gawked at me, the captive who had the honour of housing their dead Warlord’s spirit. Next we passed the sons’ cousins and sisters, with their warrior husbands and children. Finally we passed the two eldest sons’ wives and children. Clutching their toddlers and babes, the women watched me with barely concealed loathing. If the Warlord’s soul cleaved to my unborn babe, my child would outrank theirs, so naturally they hated me.

I made the sign to ward off the evil-eye.

As the sons urged me on toward the clan’s ancient Wyrding-woman my steps faltered and my stomach churned. I’d only been close to her once before, when she’d touched my belly to sense the new life-force quickening. Then I had been too frightened to move.

Now, her wizened face glowed with satisfaction. Incredibly old, mother to the Warlord himself, she had outlived all her children, had lived long enough to see her grandchildren produce children. Truly, she was so powerful that even her apprentices would be stronger than me.

When the sons had first captured me, I’d looked for girls with the Wyrding-signs but couldn’t find them. Maybe they were like me, born with a caul. My Wyrding-sign was safely hidden under the hearthstone of my village’s Wyrding-cottage. But I mustn’t think about my home, or the way the sons had led their raiders into my highland valley, grabbing me because my red-gold hair caught their eye.

“
Here is Sun-fire.” Lohnan, the eldest, presented me to his Wyrding grandmother. “Wild-cat, more like. It took all three of us to hold her down but she did it, she inhaled our Warlord’s dying breath.”

And vile it was too.

Triumph gleamed in the Wyrding-woman’s sunken eyes.

It was too much for me.

I sprang forward, slashing her forehead with my fingernails, drawing blood above her breath-line. It was the best way to protect myself from her power. The granddaughters screamed in outrage. Lohnan caught me and swung me around, holding my arms. Murtahg lifted his hand. I braced for the blow.

“
No!” The Wyrding-woman’s sharp voice stopped him in mid-swing. She looked pleased. I didn’t understand. Then my skin went cold with fear as I realised I’d given myself away. She wiped the blood from her eyes with a smile. Her last three teeth stood like standing stones in the mounds of her gums. “An adept of the Wyrding-ways. This, I did not foresee.”

I shook my head, but denial was useless.

The Wyrding-woman pointed to the long table. As Lohnan shoved me I looked down, unable to meet her penetrating gaze. Quick as a snake, she clawed my forehead. I gasped and bent double in shock.