Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

‘I had one friend. I don’t know if he was a proper friend, but he said he was, and nobody had told me that before, so it was something special.’

‘The juggler? How old was he?’ Clera asked, leaning in with Ruli. Jula sat nearby now, watching, her expression unreadable.

‘Twenty-two,’ Nona said, remembering Amondo’s face, light and shadow in the brilliance of the focus moon.

‘Twenty-two!’ Clera gasped and exchanged glances with Ruli. ‘That’s a grown man.’

‘What was he called?’ Jula from the next bed.

‘Amondo. He only stayed three days. He said he had to keep travelling to find new people who would pay to see his show. But on the morning that she found him gone my mother was very angry. I hadn’t seen her like that before, at least not so bad, throwing around her baskets and cursing him. Then she saw me standing in the corner, trying to be out of the way, and she said it was my fault, all of it was my fault, and that I’d driven Amondo away and that she hated me.’

‘Did he touch you?’ Clera demanded.

‘Yes.’ Nona frowned. It seemed like a stupid question.

Ruli drew in a sharp breath.

‘I mean … in a bad way?’ Clera said.

‘He didn’t hit me …’ Nona’s frown deepened. ‘He showed me how to juggle.’ She pursed her lips and shrugged. ‘And when he left I went after him. I told myself I was going to get him to come back so my mother wouldn’t be so angry with me. She was cross most of the time, as though something was wrong with everything. I don’t remember her laughing. Ever. But I thought if Amondo came back that might change and we could be happy. I told myself I was going to get him to come back – but really part of me hoped he would ask me to come with him, and another part of me knew I would say yes.

‘My father told me stories and they were different from the ones Grey Stephen would tell the village on fire-nights. They were different because I knew he had been to the places he was describing, and they made me want to go too. Da’s stories made me feel that the world went on so much further than I could see, and that the Corridor was a road that could take me anywhere. I could reach the Marn Sea and sail on a fishing boat, or dig emeralds from the ground in Tecras, or hunt whiters on the ice, or explore the tunnels and discover the Missing. Anything.

‘Old Mother Sible saw Amondo leave along the Rellam trail. She told him the forest was a haunted place but he just laughed and said everywhere had its ghosts.’

Nona fell into her own story as she had before, not hearing the words as she spoke them, only seeing events play out before the eye of her mind.

Mother Sible called after me to stop. ‘You won’t catch him ’fore he gets to the woods.’

I kept running, foot-wrappings soaked and muddy, flapping as I dodged the wheel ruts.

‘You won’t catch him …’ The old woman’s voice lost itself in the distance.

I’d been as far as the Rellam Forest before. I’d gathered sticks in the margins, hunted for hedgehogs among the dry leaves, peered into the dark spaces between the boles of the trees, looking for the faerie lights that folk in the village spoke about. Seen nothing, found nothing, except for sticks, and back at the hut they’d burned the same as any others. I’d been to the Rellam Forest before – but not as the sun was falling. And I’d never ventured in.

Still, Amondo and I both stood on the same road. We both stood beneath the same clouds, hung with sun-bright edges and rain-dark hearts – rain comes from a dark heart. I would catch up with him before it fell.

Amondo had more than an hour’s head start on me and Mother Sible proved right in her prediction. I found myself panting, sore-footed and sweaty, the trail now just a band of beaten green, winding its way into the first trees as if it too had heard the woods’ reputation and was trying to delay entering.

Everywhere has its ghosts, Amondo had said, but in most places those ghosts are at least hidden in the corners, or tucked away at right angles to the world, waiting their moment. In the Rellam Forest you could see the ghosts, patterned on the gloom beneath the canopy, the distortion of their faces frozen into the bark of ancient trunks. And you could hear them too, screaming into the silence, not quite breaking it but making it tremble.

I was scared. More scared than I’d ever been of the bigs who chased me, or of Black Will’s hound that took Jenna’s fingers the year before. What made me follow that trail with the sun falling, and the cold wind speaking through the branches, was a larger fear, one that had been with me ever since I had words to put around it: the fear that I wouldn’t ever leave that village, that I would stay and grow old and bent and be put in the ground there, wasting all the years of my life as an outsider, inside.

I got a few miles along the trail before the gloom thickened past the point that I could find my way. Hungry and cold, I crouched with my back to an old tree and waited. A light rain started to fall, the sort that’s half ice and hits the leaves with a splat, gathering in wet clumps before it drops to ground.

When you’re moving in a dark and haunted forest the urge is for every step to be taken more quickly than the last. There’s a pressure between your shoulder blades. Each creak and groan is a hunter stalking you, each flutter of wind its breath, close against your neck. You want to break and run, in any direction, just so long as it’s fast.

When you’re still the urge is to be stiller. The knowledge that eyes are turned your way quietens the air inside your lungs. You make yourself small. You hold every muscle tight. And you listen. Above all you listen to the woods as they close about you.

I stayed there, cramped and shivering and terrified, until the moon’s focus found me. The light filtered down, slow at first, making the impenetrable gloom penetrable once more, recreating the forest around me, resolving monstrosities into chance alignment of unconnected branches. Within minutes I could see the trail. I started to run. For all that time walking the path I had wanted to break and run, but that way lies madness: you don’t run from terror, not if you ever want to stop again. Now though, with the red light shafting down all around me to dapple the ground in bright patches, I ran.

Soon the focus reached its height, boiling through the clouds. The leaves began to steam, the icy rain now a warm fog. I ran, and I ran, and I ran, and I saw him.

‘Amondo!’ Just a darker blur in the fog but I cried out and raced towards him.

The man who turned and caught my arm was taller than Amondo, tall as any man in the village, all hard muscle, dirt, and the stink of old sweat. A beard tangled to the base of his neck.

‘Take her!’ He passed me to another behind him and drew his sword. Even in the fog the focus moon found dull glints among the iron plates on his leather shirt. ‘How many more of you?’ he asked.

There were four or five of the men. They all had the same iron-plated leathers, the same dark and heavy capes, red under the grime, rich cloth, the colours of some army perhaps. Some had helms, the guards around their eyes lending a strange owlish cast to their faces. Strong hands seized me, hard and pinching.

‘Amondo, she said?’ The tall man turned slowly in the steaming mist, sword before him. ‘I told you that weasel would be around here somewhere.’ He made something thin and high-pitched of his voice. ‘Amondo! Amondo! Help me, Amondo!’