Fell (The Sight 2) (2 page)

These days whenever wolf packs crossed one another’s boundaries, they made sure to give a traditional greeting, which they called Larka’s Blessing, in honour of the white she-wolf who had saved them all. But while Larka’s name had become a word for peace in the land beyond the forest, Fell’s was associated with fear, uncertainty, and even evil.

Fell looked up the slope. On the rise of the bank above him he saw the mouth of the cave, a small, dark scar in the mountainside, and quickened his pace. For tonight at least the lone black wolf was safe.

But as he approached, Fell heard a kind of restless chattering and spotted a squirrel and its mate in the coming moonlight, perched on the branch of a tree high above. Their bushy red tails were raised amongst the snowy leaves, and the male was clutching a large acorn in its nervous paws, as a kind of clicking came from its chubby little mouth. As Fell listened, his eyes opened wider, for the sound suddenly changed into a voice.

“Can’t you feel it?” said the male squirrel loudly. “Something strange is happening. Something in nature.”

Fell blinked in astonishment. The Sight bestowed on the wolf the gift to talk to some animals—birds—but only Larka had ever reached all the Lera, with her mind and her understanding. Fell had never understood animals such as these before. Was he haunted?

“What is happening, Cosmo?” whispered the second squirrel.

“I don’t know,” answered her mate, “but I feel it everywhere. On the air and in the undergrowth. I feel it in the very elements themselves. Some great change comes.”

Fell stirred at the strange words and noticed storm clouds massing in the skies, and he gave a low growl. As soon as the wary squirrels heard the wolf, Cosmo and his mate vanished higher up their tree, and Fell shook his head, telling himself that he must be imagining it.

He padded into the cave and stopped in front of a little pile of gnawed rabbit bones, his huge pink tongue lolling from his mouth. Inside he heard the whispering plash of water and a voice in his head saying: “Fear it, wolf. Fear death by water.” It made him brace instinctively for wolves fear nothing so much as a watery death, a death Fell had once faced himself. But this pool, fed by a spring guttering from the belly of the mountain, was only a small one. It was the Sight which frightened Fell now, and its second power to bring on sudden visions in water.

He walked forwards hesitantly, then dropped his muzzle to drink. The water tasted so good, clean and delicious, as Fell stilled his thirst. He caught his own reflection and his face surprised him. Fell had often asked himself if it was the power of the Sight that kept him in his prime, and thoughts of the Sight brought back thoughts of the past.

Try as he might to push it away, the past was hunting Fell today, and he growled again. The black wolf had been fooled so perfectly by his aunt Morgra, who had known all along that it wasn’t only Larka who possessed the Sight. The powers still burned inside the black wolf, and set him apart from the Varg. How could a creature such as Fell, touched by powers beyond his control, and which sometimes filled him with fear, live amongst others as a normal wolf? A creature who had known such hate and fury, and learnt to kill with such passion, whenever the bloodlust gripped him, as it does all wolves at times. He shuddered as he remembered how his powers had allowed him to blind Morgra’s fighters, the Balkar, the Night Hunters as they were also called.

He hardly knew himself how Morgra had got to him, but using her own power, she had touched Fell’s mind and taught him terrible things. She had filled his heart with darkness, telling him that like her he was evil. Fell had believed it too, until Larka had come.

Yet that was all long ago, and dear Larka was dead. She had gone beyond even the Red Meadow, where wolves first go when they die and become shadow memories of what has been. Morgra and her Balkar were defeated now, and the wolves were free again. The human child, through whom Morgra had hoped to control all mankind, had been returned to its own village by Fell himself.

As the wolf stood there looking down, a gust of wind came breathing through the cave mouth, and for a moment Fell thought he heard a ghostly sigh. He dismissed it, but the wintry wind rose and suddenly Fell heard a voice.

“Help the child,” it seemed to say.

Fell swung his head, but there was no one there, not even the squirrels, and the wolf told himself he must be imagining things. He looked back into the pool, and his huge eyes seemed drawn deeper into the water. Suddenly Fell snarled. There was a human. The Sight had come on him again, more clearly than it had in ages, and Fell saw a boy in the pool, with a handsome face, cropped red hair, and sparkling hazel eyes. He was sitting on a rock, and in the snowy background, three black-and-white birds hopped about. Fell was mesmerised, and he knew that what he was seeing lay somewhere in the future. The Sight was giving him a vision of what was to come.

The boy in the water pushed up his right shirtsleeve. On his thin forearm was a strange mark. It seemed etched in blood, but Fell could not make out the shape, except that it reminded him somehow of a bird.

Humans
, thought Fell gravely. After the animals had learned the Great Secret, that humans were animals too, it was man whom Fell had watched for five long years, disobeying the oldest Varg law—to have nothing to do with their kind—and using the power of the Sight to look into their minds, and trying to read their thoughts.

It would come on him quite suddenly, when he was near their tents, or when he stumbled on a human trap in the forest, and when he watched the Tsingani, the gypsies of the forests, and their hidden campfires from the trees. A flash of vision, showing him pictures of their lives. The third power of the Sight.

On many occasions this closeness to the humans had nearly cost Fell his life, for with their beliefs in their gods and demons, with their ignorance and fear of nature, they hated wolves as no other animal in the wild.

With flaming tapers and shouts of fear and hate, they had tried to drive the black wolf out, and so in their angry minds, Fell had seen little but life’s ruthless struggle for survival. Yet the wolf had kept returning to them, driven by a power that he knew was greater than himself, and by a longing to understand them and the Sight that tormented his dreams.

Fell tried to shrug off the image of the boy, but although the picture seemed to sink deeper into the water, it did not vanish. Now it appeared as if a dusting of snow was falling on its surface. Fell blinked in utter astonishment. Another face was forming: not a human’s this time, but a beautiful white muzzle and yellow gold eyes. Above the image of the boy, a she-wolf was staring back at Fell, and not just any wolf.

“Larka,” he gasped.

Fell had not seen Larka in over five years. After Morgra had seized his mind, it was his sister who had shown Fell the truth again, and made him remember who he really was. Dear Larka had convinced Fell that Morgra’s was the real darkness, and reminded him that as much as life can be filled with anger and struggle—the feelings he had always wrestled with as a growing Varg—it is also filled with love and courage and sacrifice. Her own.

The beautiful she-wolf said nothing in the water. Her eyes smiled back gently, and Fell lifted a paw and whined softly, stroking tenderly at the water, frightened to break the delicate image of his sister.

“Larka. How I miss you, sister.”

Still the white wolf looked back, unspeaking, and Fell shook his muzzle, feeling lonelier than ever, but dismissing stories of ghosts in these parts.

“It’s just the past, Larka,” he murmured. “Always the past. You’re dead and gone. We lose everything in the end.”

As Fell said it, the wind came licking furiously into the cave, and on its back Fell heard that voice a second time. Distinctly.

“Help the changeling, Fell. The child is close.”

Fell started violently, almost convinced he was being haunted now.

“Larka?”

“You must help the human, Fell.”

The wind rose, and Fell could not tell if it was the breeze speaking, or his sister in the water. He wondered. He had often sensed that Larka had gone beyond the Red Meadow, where the dead first gather, to a place from where none returned. How could this be?

“Destiny,” the voice seemed to whisper. “The child has a great destiny, Fell. It is marked.”

Fell’s tail lifted. The boy he could still see faintly below Larka’s face had a mark on his arm. He remembered too the words of a blind old fortune-teller called Tsinga he had met long ago. She had spoken of Fell’s destiny—“
Perhaps as important as any. Everything has a destiny
.”

“Aid it, Fell, to fulfil its destiny. For all of us. For nature itself.”

“Nature itself?” whispered the black wolf in astonishment.

As he spoke, Larka’s face seemed to grow fainter in the pool again, fractured by the breeze stirring the water’s surface.

“Great confusion, brother. Great evil. Hurry.”

Fell whined. Larka was beginning to disappear altogether.

“Stay, Larka,” he cried. “Tell me more of this. Where is this child?”

“Gone,” the wind answered hauntingly. “Can no longer see, Fell. So faint now. All my strength to speak. Seek out friends, dear Fell. The Helpers. Find the Guardian.”

“Please, Larka,” growled Fell, wondering who this Guardian was, and if this voice was really in his own mind. “Don’t go.”

“Nature and the child’s survival are one. Hurry.”

Larka vanished and Fell stood there shuddering, as a breath of ice came on the autumn breeze, and outside great smudges of white began to float down from the heavens. It had started to snow.

The wolf was amazed and terrified, and wondered if he were dreaming. What could it mean, and had it really been Larka’s ghost talking to him? What of these strange words of a Guardian and the Helpers?

Fell thought of Skart, the wise steppe eagle who had aided Larka in her own journey. Skart had been one of the Helpers, the birds of the air, through whose eyes those with the Sight could travel out of their bodies and see the whole world from the skies. The first power of the Sight. He shivered unhappily at the thought. The black wolf had seen far too much of the world already and wanted nothing to do with this strange injunction.

He could see the boy still, though, and the image in the water grew closer again, although it changed now into a different picture of the future. Or was it the future? For now it felt like the present. As Fell looked at the boy, he had the most extraordinary thought. Could it be the same baby he had returned to the human village, five years before? Fell didn’t know that this boy was much older than the child would be, for he had no real knowledge of a human’s life span, compared to a Varg’s.

He looked down into the pool, and as the snowfall grew heavier, felt as if he were looking through a doorway into another world entirely. The boy’s eyes were closed this time, and the sweating passion of a dream gripped his young face. A human.

“WAKE UP QUICKLY, ALIN, Uncle’s coming,” said a nervous little voice in the human den. The dreamer heard it faintly, and hazel eyes opened suddenly and looked up anxiously at the little girl. It was the same boyish face that Fell had just spied in the cave pool, with the powers of the Sight, and in the left pupil was a fleck of green, like his own.

“You’re just having another bad dream,” whispered the little girl, with a kindly smile. Her name was Mia.

The dreamer smiled back at Mia. The dream had been full of noisy shouts and arguing adult voices, and thank heavens it was over now.

Mia was clothed simply, in a plain little peasant dress, as she looked down at the strange mark on her friend’s arm. The faint symbol etched there was of a bird of prey, an eagle with opening wings, and Mia had often wondered what it meant, and if the goblins had really made it. After what Mia had discovered today, she was keener than ever to know what it really was.

Alina stirred on the bench and got up, as Mia grinned and held up a pair of rusting sheep sheers.

“Shall I cut your hair again?” she asked her friend softly.

The dreamer shook her head sleepily, although she knew she would have to cut her hair soon, for it was starting to grow out again. With her cropped red hair and rough shepherd’s clothes, the older girl might have been a boy of twelve or thirteen, for everything about Alina Sculcuvant, or Alin as Mia had just called her, was designed to conceal the strange secret that she was really a girl.

In this household Alina was treated as toughly as any boy though, and made to work twice as hard. With all the chores she had to do about the place, she rarely got enough rest, but if the old shepherd Malduk ever caught her napping like this, poor Alina knew there’d be the devil to pay. She was nervous too, because that same morning she had had one of her strange feelings, which she believed always meant something special was about to happen.

The pretence surrounding Alina Sculcuvant had begun seven years before, when Mia’s uncle Malduk had found her up there in the snows, unconscious, and had taken her to see the old woman on the mountain. The strange girl had received a blow to her head and been desperately bewildered and confused, hardly able to speak, except to mutter her name and a plaintive apology. But the witch had placed her spindly fingers on a glass sphere and gasped at what she had seen there.

“A changeling,” she’d hissed, “she’s a changeling child.”

The witch had turned to old Malduk then and clutched his hands fearfully.

“She may have been born a human, Malduk, and stolen long ago, or she may be one of their own. But you must conceal her, man, lest the goblins and fairies come to snatch her back again. Hide the child.”

The old witch had spoken to Alina too, and persuaded her that she had come by magic out of the winter wilds into the world of men, perhaps found first by the Tsingani in the forest and then discarded, or perhaps escaping from the fairies. She had clasped little Alina’s hands too and told her that she must accept her new life with gratitude and humility, and never look back at her origins, lest she bring down a terrible curse on them all. At eight, poor little Alina had succumbed easily enough, just as she had accepted Malduk’s orders that she must cut her hair and dress as a boy.

That whole first year, in the shepherd’s home, twelve long months, Alina had not been able to speak a word to anyone, and instead had looked out on the life with fixed and frightened eyes. Since then she had grown into a life filled with strange dreams.

Mia put down the shears, and now she looked at Alina excitedly. She had just had a thought.

“What is it, Mia?”

“Alina, will you tell me another story?”

“A story?”

Mia nodded enthusiastically.

Alina was well known around the village of Moldov for her fabulous stories—tales of fairies and sprites and witches, of lost children, or of the creatures she saw in nature—and she had often used them to stop the other boys teasing and bullying her.

“Yes, Alina. Like that story you made up of those children and the pebbles in the forest, and their horrid stepmother,” said Mia eagerly. “Or that tale of wild animals that can talk. That was so wonderful. It made me feel so much better, Alina, and so much braver somehow.”

Alina smiled warmly at her little friend. Many of the village children, when they weren’t feeling jealous, marvelled at how easily the boy Alin could spin a yarn, and some said it was a fairy gift. The children had even given the strange boy a name—Sculcuvant. It literally meant “word” and a “sheep’s skein,” or something like Alin WovenWord, or when they were trying to be cruel, Alin SkeinTale.

There was a heavy cough in the yard outside, and Alina saw old Malduk through the cottage window, approaching the hovel. She quickly covered the mark on her arm with her sleeve and straightened her thin woollen coat.

“Later, Mia.”

The old shepherd pushed open the door and stepped inside the humble dwelling. Malduk had a hard and deeply lined face, and he was carrying a little slingshot in his right hand, which he often used to throw stones at the sheep. He snapped it on the air and cursed loudly, and Alina saw from his coat that it was snowing heavily outside. As the slingshot gave a sharp “crack,” Mia clenched her right hand into a small fist, her eyes flickering warily between her uncle and an old wooden chest in the middle of the smoky room. Malduk and her aunt Ranna had repeatedly warned the children never to go near it.

“What are you staring at?” grunted the shepherd, as he saw the children standing there.

“Nothing, Uncle,” answered Mia quickly.

“Then fetch me a bowl of hot broth. I’m famished, and freezing too.”

“Yes, Uncle,” said the little girl immediately, darting towards the stove and kitchen area at the side of the room. As she went, Mia glanced back nervously at the chest, and slipped something into her pocket, something she had meant to show Alina before being distracted with thoughts of stories. A little metal key.

“And you,” Malduk snapped at Alina, “don’t just stand about like a dolt. Help me pull off my boots, girl.”

The shepherd slammed the door shut, crossed the room, and sat down on the chest, near a huge pile of old sheepskins, rubbing his back painfully and putting a booted foot up on a milking stool. The boot was made of rough deerskin, tied in the manner of local shepherds, with bindings of cured wool. Alina took her dagger from her belt, a simple thing with a handle made of antler horn, and placed it on the chest, lest it get in the way, then knelt down meekly to undo Malduk’s boot. The shepherd watched her coldly.

Ranna’s right
, he thought as he sat there,
the girl’s certainly growing up fast. She’s almost as big as me now
. At fifteen Alina Sculcuvant had suddenly shot up, and she was unusually tall for her age. As he watched her, Malduk thought of the son he had always longed for, a son he had never been able to have with his wife, Ranna.

At least they could make Alin do a man’s work in the open, he told himself, which Malduk’s advancing years, and a back strained badly in a fall, were making harder for him by the day. Without the gossipy backbiting from the rival shepherds, either, that would certainly have ensued if they’d sent a girl out into the fields. Malduk consoled himself too that a son would probably never have been so pliant as she. Alina had always been easy enough to bully and control, and with the little food they allowed her, and the constant hard work they had for years set her on their farm, she was like clay in their hands.

Apart from the witch’s injunction that Alina should hide herself from the fairies and goblins of the forest, Malduk and Ranna had told the little girl that it was best to conceal herself like this because, in the wars that gripped Transylvania, and the frequent raids by the Turks, girls were highly prized and often carried away like cattle.

For Alina, her strange concealment called to a darkness she felt deep within. With time she had begun to question the changeling story, yet for years her sleep had been filled with those strange dreams. Of a great fairy-tale palace high in the clouds, and mysterious elven folk, who carried antlers in their hands like swords. Of being held safe for a time in a pair of strong, loving arms, and a grand household where she heard the sound of a haunting fairy lullaby in the night. Sleep pictures too of a woman with curling black hair and a man with red hair like her own, who she thought and hoped might have been her real parents. Not goblins at all, but people.

They made her happy sometimes, until a dream came that frightened Alina Sculcuvant horribly. It was of a creature with great, slavering fangs, flying at her from the shadows to drink her blood. That was the dream that made Alina turn away from the past, whatever it was.

Little Mia, who had come to the household only two years before—after her own parents’ deaths from a sudden fever that had swept the region—often wondered about Alina and the story of fairies. To Mia, Alina certainly had the air of a changeling, with her skill with animals, her love of the wild, and her thoughtful, piercing eyes. With the power to know things too before they happened. It was never anything dramatic. A dream of rain the next day perhaps, or of a sudden meeting, but it added to the air of mystery surrounding the older girl. A mystery that her aunt and uncle had ordered Mia to keep secret too, with threats of a beating.

Mia admired Alina deeply, and she was sad that her aunt and uncle treated the older girl so cruelly. Sad too that the village children and the shepherds never stopped picking on Alin when they were out at work in the fields. They also muttered of changeling origins but, not knowing what the witch had said of hiding a girl from the fairies, had no reason to believe Alin wasn’t a boy.

The villagers still mistrusted him deeply though, not only as a changeling, but for the Saxon blood they saw in his red hair. They were Vlaks, deeply clannish and naturally frightened of strangers in their tiny town, clustered around a little stream and surrounded by great forests and soaring mountains, shielding them from the outside world.

“Be careful there, damn it,” growled Malduk, as Alina’s efforts to remove his second boot twisted a painful blister on his foot.

“I’m sorry, Malduk …”

“So you should be,” snapped the old man. “I wonder sometimes why we ever took in a stupid, good-for-nothing girl. The other shepherds are always complaining about you, daydreaming, inventing lying stories, or talking of better things.”

It was a complaint Alina had often heard over the years, but with the bitter cold snap, Malduk seemed especially irritable today. Alina dropped her gaze, telling herself, as she always did, that she ought to be grateful to the shepherd and his hard, old wife.

The girl could remember so little of her true origins, and where she had really come from. Of what the mysterious eagle on her arm was, or where she had been going in the snows. She did have sudden flashbacks though, and over these last few years had tried to piece together a fractured story of who she might really be.

She often told herself that she wasn’t a fairy child at all, but that she had been snatched as a baby from a human home by goblins. That home she peopled with those half-seen figures of her dreams. The man with red hair, who she felt a great tenderness towards, although he seemed distant and aloof too. The dark-haired woman Alina made her human mother, because she felt so powerfully drawn to her. Yet in the ensuing dreams the woman was always harsh and cold with her, and would give her orders and treat her just as cruelly as Malduk and Ranna. And the red-haired man and the black-haired woman had often argued bitterly.

At last Alina Sculcuvant had decided that if she had been taken by fairies, or even gypsies, as a little girl, then she must have been some kind of servant in her past too, for she half remembered a bare room where she had slept, and other working people around her, who would scold her for her laziness. Perhaps that was better than being a true fairy, Alina sometimes tried to console herself by thinking.

There was something else in poor Alina’s heart though—a feeling that she had done something terribly wrong. Alina didn’t know where this dreadful guilt came from, but it always made her sorrowful and timid, and it grew far worse when she dreamt one dream in particular.

She was standing in a kind of hall, with a little wooden cot swaying beside her, and behind her that dark-haired woman was shouting angrily, and a face would come to her of a smiling baby boy in the cradle, looking up and gurgling happily at her. She felt it was her brother, and felt love for the child too, but then that shadow and those teeth would suddenly appear—the vampire—and the child would vanish. Alina would wake from this ghastly nightmare, trying to hold onto the image of the baby’s face, sweating and feeling like a traitor, or a murderer. Alina was certain then that she had done something terribly wrong, and thus that she was really in exile.

“Pull harder there, girl.”

She yanked at the second boot, and nearly fell backwards as it came off too. Malduk sighed contentedly and even smiled at Alina, as he stretched and wiggled his feet in his filthy woollen stockings.