Winterbringers (12 page)

“Down there.” She pointed into the blurred snow.

“Are you sure?” said Josh, doubtfully.

“Yes.” She certainly sounded sure.

They fought their way forward. Around them the wind rose higher, blowing snow so hard at them that it was virtually impossible to speak. Above the wind came the loud breath of the Black Winter, deeper and faster now, like an animal rousing from sleep.

They pushed on as fast as they could, but now the snow seemed to fight them at every step. Callie wasn’t as sure as she had sounded that she was heading in the right direction, so it was with enormous relief that she saw through the blizzard the line of small trees that marked the river bank.

“There!” she yelled at Josh.

He nodded in return.

“Nearly there,” she shouted encouragingly to the King.

With a sound like shattering glass, the fallen snow around them exploded into life.

Hands shot out of the icy snow around them, grabbing sightlessly. Too shocked to scream or run, Josh and Callie froze.

Arms emerged fully, shoulders, heads, dragging themselves from the frozen mounds of snow, each one a replica of the Winter King, their icy hair woven with feathers and bones of frost.

“Run!” yelled the King. “Get to the river. See to the boat. You cannot help here.”

Luath ran here and there, biting at hands and faces as they emerged, maiming but not killing the ice creatures.

“Go!”

They turned and ran for the river as best they could, swerving, half-falling; anything to avoid the grasping hands. They crashed through the trees in a shower of snow and there lay the stream in front of them, frozen solid.

Callie pulled the boat out of her pocket and set it down on the ice. The thread had already been fastened to it in the Smithy. Josh pulled off his gloves with his teeth and willed his numb fingers to tie the other end round an alder branch which Callie showed him.

“Nothing's happening,” he said anxiously.

“The blood,” Callie yelled in his ear. “We forgot the blood.”

They glanced back up the slope, to where the Winter King and Luath held the ice-warriors at bay.

Callie fumbled for the penknife in her pocket and tried unsuccessfully to open it.

“Give it to me.”

She passed it to Josh without argument. He blew on his fingers and pulled at the blade and it slowly unfolded. He jabbed the point into his thumb immediately and passed it back to Callie and held his hand over the boat on the ice. His fingers were so cold that the blood wouldn't flow out of the cut. He rubbed his thumb hard with his other hand, coaxed a sullen drop from it and let it fall into the boat.

Up on the bank, the King and Luath were retreating before the onslaught of the ice warriors, one slow step at a time.

Callie let her blood fall into the boat, her breath held.

Nothing happened.

“What's wrong?” she yelled. “We did everything. Why isn't it working?”

“I don't know.”

They stared at the boat as though they could will it to do what they wanted.

Think
, Callie urged herself.
Picture Agnes' journal. Remember the words.

Beatrix had a long coil of white silk thread. She tied one end to the boat and the other to a trailing branch, so the boat would find its way home, then set it down on the water of t
he …

“The water!”

“What?”

“The boat has to be on the water. Quick, we have to break the ice.”

Luath and the King had fallen back to the trees now. They only had a few more seconds before they would all be overwhelmed. Josh and Callie kicked at the snow on the bank trying to find something they could use to break the ice. With a gasp, Josh pulled a fist-sized stone free from the earth
and hammered at the ice in front of the boat.

“Hurry!” screamed Callie “They're coming.”

Josh struck at the ice over and over again, as hard as he could, but it didn't even crack.

“It's no good.”

With a sob, Callie threw herself at the ice and hammered at it with her fists.

“Break! Break!”

The ice shattered under her hand and split apart, a channel of shining dark water opening in front of the tiny boat. The slab of ice it lay on tilted sideways and the boat slid down and onto the water.

As they watched, it seemed to shiver, and then to swell, until it lay tethered by a white rope to the tree, a small boat still, but big enough for all of them.

Callie threw herself into the boat and held tight to a branch to stop it drifting.

“Quick – get in!” Josh yelled.

Luath bounded down the bank and jumped into the boat.

With a cry, the Winter King hurled the ice sword at the Winterbringers. It shattered into tiny shards with a noise like a bell and he fell and rolled down the slope.

Josh hauled him into the boat and half-fell in himself and Callie pushed off.

As well as the boat, the stream seemed to have grown much wider and within a few seconds they were floating in a channel in the centre, out of reach of anything on the bank.

Josh pulled himself up and looked properly at the boat. “It worked,” he said in amazement, staring at the reddish-brown stains on the bottom. “What did you do to the ice?”

“I didn't do any thing to it. I just hit it.”

“But I'd been hammering it with that stone and nothing had happened.”

“I must just have hit a weak spot or something. I don't know. It doesn't matter anyway.”

“No.” He turned to the King. “Are you all right?”

The King nodded, still gasping for breath as he lay in the bottom of the boat, one hand clutching the pouch at his throat that held the precious feather.

On the shore, the ice warriors moved, scenting the air like dogs, but unwilling or unable to enter the water.

The ice drew apart before the boat as it moved smoothly through the water, and the stream widened and settled within steeply cut banks as the white rope uncoiled behind them.

Callie looked back, but there was only an indistinct milky white mist.

The boat moved steadily on, as though it had a purpose. Luath had moved to the prow with Callie and sat eagerly, head up, ears pricked, sniffing the unfamiliar air.

Trees leaned in above them, bare branches strung with tiny icicles arching and lacing together above the stream so that they slid through a still, silvery tunnel.

“Where are we?” Josh breathed.

“Wherever we are, we're not in Pitmillie any more.”

“We are on the path to the Kingdom of Summer,” said the King softly from behind her, sitting up and looking around him properly for the first time since he tumbled into the boat. “If it still exists at all.” He pulled off his borrowed jacket and dropped it in the bottom of the boat.

His words were ominous and indeed, there was no trace of summer in the landscape around them.

They sat in silence as the boat sailed on through its channel.

“The ice is getting thinner,” said Josh suddenly. The others looked for a moment.

“You're right,” said Callie.

Above them, the sky began to change. The snow clouds thinned and dissolved and were replaced by the sun, low in the sky, turning the tunnel of trees and the boat golden.

The icicles had gone from the branches and instead a few dead leaves clung to them, brown-gold. The ice had receded to the thinnest of crusts at the edge of the stream and the water flowed smoothly, as though it was deep. Here and there the surface was dotted with the shrivelled remains of water plants.

Time passed. They drifted wordlessly through a landscape that had changed from winter not to summer, but to autumn: a landscape of brown and yellow, silver-grey and gold. A dying landscape, Callie thought, rousing from a dream. She had no idea how long they had been in the boat.

Before them now, the stream widened to a still pool. At the far side was a little jetty of silvery wood, overgrown with moss and lichen. Moored to it was a boat, much like their own, with a coil of white rope in the bottom. Josh and Callie stared at it, wide-eyed.

“Do you think …” Callie started to say.

“It can't be, can it?”

Their voices sounded appallingly loud against the silence that enveloped the place.

“Agnes said the boat went back,” she went on in a whisper. “But that was over three hundred years ago. It couldn't still be here. It looks as new as ours.”

“Agnes said that time seemed to forget what to do here,” mused Josh.

The boat drew itself up alongside the jetty and stopped. Josh and Callie turned to the King, not sure what to do next. His face was unreadable as he climbed wearily from the boat. There was no sound, no sign of a living creature, only the
trees ahead of them, hung with rags of autumn leaves, and a winding path of dry brown grass that twisted away through them.

The others climbed onto the jetty, and Luath took his place at the King's side again. At the edge of the jetty the King hesitated for a moment, then set his foot to the grass and started along the path, the others behind him.

The way led through groves of trees, some of which Callie, though not Josh, recognized as oak and rowan and birch. Others were unfamiliar to her. Many were dead, branches stark against the sky, and the others looked as they would at the end of autumn, stubborn remnants of leaves clinging to the branches here and there.

Their feet moved through heaps of fallen leaves that no breeze had stirred, as they followed the path up a slope, the King leading the way with Luath at his side, Callie and Josh behind.

Below them lay a broad valley covered in tussocky dry grass and tangled brambles, bare of leaves. The low rays of the sun stained some of them a rusty red, as though they were bleeding, or burning.

In the middle of the valley was a tremendous twisted snarl of tree trunks and shrubs, branches sprouting from it at odd angles, fungi clamped to trunks like great brackets, ivy choking everything.

The King gave a cry of anguish.

They looked at his stricken face.

“What is this place?” asked Josh.

“It is her palace,” he replied with difficulty. “Summer's heart.”

“Oh, Agnes,” whispered Callie, “what did you do?”

Josh and Callie stared, trying to reconcile the bleak scene in front of them with Agnes' description of the Queen
of Summer's palace, with its walls of birch and roses and honeysuckle, all leaf and blossom, pierced with doorways and windows. There was no sign of a doorway in this tangle of dying wood before them.

“Are we too late?” Callie's voice shook.

“I do not know. I fear it when I see this place, and yet I cannot believe that she could die and I not know it. We must go down and find a way in. If she still lives, that is where she will be.”

They began to pick their way down the slope, treacherous with dead leaves and twisted, grasping stems of grass,
zig-zagging
to avoid clumps of bramble. Callie thought she had never been in such a melancholy place in her life. There was no sound – not a note of birdsong or an insect's buzz – just the noise of leaves and snapping stems under their wary feet.

They reached the bottom of the slope and made their way across the floor of the valley to the remains of the palace. Their was no obvious way in, nothing that resembled a door or window. They followed the King's lead and began to tear at the ivy that cloaked most of this side of the palace in great sour-smelling swathes. Watching him from the corner of her eye as they pulled it down, Callie realized that he had regained some strength since they reached the Kingdom, even in its present, ruinous state. At that moment, Josh yelled.

“Here. I think there's a way in.”

You certainly couldn't have called it a doorway. It was just a narrow gap between two huge briar stems that seemed to lead, reasonably straight, through the whole living thickness of the wall.

He squeezed and twisted his way through, Callie following. The King, being taller and broader, had more difficulty, but no barrier would have stopped him now, and he emerged
a few seconds later, scratched and panting. Luath loped in behind him, and they turned to see what lay inside the palace.

Brambles and ivy had laced hands across much of the roof opening, and it took their eyes a few seconds to adjust to the dimness. When they did, the first thing they saw was a dead, white tree in the centre of the great hall in which they stood, split as though struck by lightning. Most of the floor was bare earth, but here and there clumps of grass were still green, and there were a few, a very few, tiny white and golden flowers among them.

“Oh no; the poor things.” Callie was close to tears; the King beyond speech.

Here and there on the ground were the bodies of dragonflies and birds and butterflies, a few still moving, but close to death. They moved among them, sick and silent with fear, but nowhere did they find the body of a Kingfisher; and then the King gave a cry and reached his hand inside the split trunk of the birch tree and brought out something greeny-blue and chestnut, that he held as though it was indescribably precious.

“Is …” Josh couldn't bear to have his question answered.

The King sank to his knees, cradling the Kingfisher in his left hand as he reached for the pouch around his neck with the other. In his hand, the bird lay quite still and limp. He brought out the feather and laid it on the Kingfisher's breast and held the bird between his two hands.

“Do not be dead, my love,” he whispered. “See; I have brought you back yourself. You are whole again. Do not be dead.”

Callie’s eyes clouded with tears that she made no move to wipe away. The King and the Kingfisher were indistinct in her blurred sight, seeming to shimmer and move and change. She blinked the tears away and drew her breath in sharply and was still, Josh at her side staring too at what was before them.

On his knees, the King cradled a woman in his arms. Her dress was a shifting pattern of blue-green and chestnut overlaid with veins of gold. Her hair, spilling over the King’s arms and on to the ground, was sunlight and rose petals and ripe oats and streamers of cloud. Her eyes, when they opened, were the blue of a summer night.

The Winter King and the Queen of Summer each held the other in their gaze, drinking in the presence they had each thought they would never see again.

After what seemed like a very long time, the Queen spoke.

“What have you done? I am whole. How have you done this?”

It seemed he would never speak, that he could not have his fill of simply looking at her, but finally he said, “I came from the Frozen Lands one final time to be with you when you died and the Black Winter overwhelmed the land, but these two” – he drew her gaze to Josh and Callie – “found what had been taken from you, so long ago. It is they who have saved you.”

“I do not understand this,” she said wonderingly, “but
there will be time for that.” She smiled. “Now, there will be time.”

Around the hall the creatures who had lain dying a few minutes ago stirred, and shifted between bird or insect and human form. Those that were dead however, did not change.

As their human forms settled about them they sat and stared, marvelling, at their Queen, who seemed to grow stronger by the second.

She sat up fully now, and indicated Luath. “And who is this?”

“This is my noble companion Luath, who helped me slay many ice warriors who would have stopped us reaching you. Without him I do not think I could have withstood them.”

The King stood and drew her to her feet, and she walked, leaning on him a little, to where Josh and Callie and Luath waited.

The Queen held one of Josh’s hands between her own and stared into his eyes for a few seconds. He had to make an effort to meet her gaze, for it was as though she could see straight into his heart. She smiled and let go, then turned to Callie and cupped her cheek in her hand. Her smile widened. “You, I recognize,” she said.

“But I’ve never seen you before.”

“True; but you are like the other one.”

Callie was silent, puzzled.

Lastly, the Queen put a hand under Luath’s muzzle and tilted his head up so that they could look at each other. “Thank you,” she said to the dog gravely.

She turned back to the King. The remains of her people were gathering about her now, communicating, somehow, without speech.

The Queen looked about her at the ruins of her palace. “There is much to do, but in time the Kingdom of Summer
will be as it was before.” She turned back to Josh and Callie. “And your land will be as it should, but you will have to be patient, for it will take a long time for the seasons to regain their balance. It may be years, by your reckoning.”

She looked thoughtful. “You should go back now. I do not know how long you have been here.”

Her words struck a chill through Callie. She remembered the Queen’s words in Agnes’ journal.
Who knows how much time may have passed while you have been here?

“Yes, of course we should. Come on, Luath.” This time the dog came to her side straight away.

The King came forward and put a hand on each of their shoulders. “Callie … Josh … There is nothing I can say that is enough. You found me in despair, dying; you have restored to me my life and my love, and yet there is nothing I can give you in thanks, for it is certainly clear that nothing of the Kingdom of Summer may go into your world again.”

“But the Queen said our world is mended too. That seems like pretty good thanks to me,” said Josh.

The King nodded, smiling.

A little later, Josh, Callie and Luath stood at the top of the slope looking back down to the overgrown palace. Already the Queen’s people were at work hauling down great sheets of ivy and bramble. They had uncovered one of the windows so that the palace was no longer blind.

The King and Queen stood together just outside, watching them go, and they raised their hands in farewell. Josh and Callie waved and turned to walk through the woods back to the boat.

At first they were silent, trying to digest what had
happened, but as they took in properly what was around them, Callie spoke.

“How could that happen so quickly?”

The last of the dead leaves had fallen and in their place, green buds were breaking from every tree and bush.

Josh shook his head. “I’ve got no idea. I just hope it
has
happened quickly.”

They increased their pace, anxious now to get back to where they belonged, Luath trotting ahead. As they emerged from the woods, Callie stopped so abruptly that Josh crashed into her.

“It’s gone,” she said.

With a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, Josh looked at the jetty and the pool beyond. There was no trace of their boat, tethered to their own world by its white rope. Only Agnes’ boat lay at rest in the water.

“We didn’t tell it to wait. Agnes said they told their boat to wait. We forgot to do that,” she said, panic mounting in her voice.

“It’s okay,” Josh said, trying to sound calm. “We’ll just go back and get them to help us make a boat. It won’t be hard; after all there’s plenty of wood.”

“But that will take time, and we’ve no idea how long we’ve really been here.”

But Josh had thought of something worse. “We can’t,” he said, his voice flat. “Remember? Nothing from the Kingdom can go into our world again.”

“But we can send it back.”

“Can you see them risking that after what’s just happened?”

“No.”

There was a despondent silence.

“We’ll just have to take Agnes’ boat and hope it remembers
the way home.”

“It’s three hundred years old! It must be falling to bits.”

“It doesn’t look as though it’s falling to bits. And at least it comes from our world. Do you have a better idea?”

He sighed. “No. I don’t have any ideas.”

“Well, then.”

As though he had been waiting for the end of the discussion, Luath jumped neatly down into the boat. It rocked against the jetty and settled again.

Callie got in next and Josh, cautiously, last. The boat seemed perfectly sound.

“Now what?”

There was no mooring rope to untie, no oars to row with.

“Come on boat, do something. You must have worked without oars before. Take us back.”

Nothing happened.

Callie tried. “Boat, take us home; back to Pitmillie.” She pushed against the jetty to set the boat moving out into the pool.

They held their breath. The boat turned and moved smoothly out across the water towards the river that had brought them here. As it nosed into the channel there was a flash of blue and they looked up to see a pair of Kingfishers swooping around the boat before taking flight through the wood.

Josh and Callie smiled at each other in wonder. “That’s them, isn’t it?”

Callie nodded. “I think so.”

They were moving down the river now, away from the Kingdom. Luath sat with his head on the side of the boat, watching the banks go by. Callie and Josh looked around them more anxiously, seeing everywhere signs of new growth. As the trees closed in around them, stitched with tiny buds, Josh
said, “Shouldn’t there be ice by now?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe it doesn’t start until we’re closer to home.”

Unfurling leaves of water plants lay on the stream’s surface now, where previously there had only been frost-blackened stems.

At last and to their huge relief, there came the first faint cracks as thin ice broke before the boat and the landscape that they could glimpse through the tunnel of trees turned more wintry by the moment. As it did so however, they became aware of another, less welcome change.

“What’s happening to the boat?” asked Callie in alarm as a piece of the edge crumbled under her fingers. Luath’s hackles rose.

Although it still moved steadily forward, the boat had begun to creak and groan around them.

“I think it’s remembered how old it really is,” replied Josh, keeping as still as possible.

Around them, the ice was growing thicker, and the boat slowed, having increasing trouble pushing its way through.

“How close are we to Pitmillie?” he called to Callie, as a shudder seemed to pass through the entire boat.

She squinted through the trees on the bank. “Not very far I think. The stream’s getting narrower and the banks aren’t so steep.”

“I hope you’re right,” he said desperately as the wood began to split.

“There’s the other boat!” Callie yelled, and he looked to where she was pointing just as, with a great crack, Agnes Blair’s boat fell apart under them, throwing them into the icy stream.

Fortunately it was only hip-deep, though cold enough to take their breath away. They hauled themselves out on the
bank just in time to see the last piece of timber, with a faded eye still visible on it, disappear below the surface.

Luath shook the water out of his rough coat, making the two of them even wetter in the process. They stood on the bank, shivering.

“What should we do about our boat?”

“I think we have to send it back like Agnes did,” said Callie between chattering teeth. They picked their way along the bank to where their boat lay and untied the rope that tethered it to their world. Josh lifted the Winter King’s borrowed jacket from the bottom.

“You should have waited you know,” Callie said reproachfully to the boat. “Anyway, you’d better go back now. Off you go.”

She pushed the boat away from the bank and watched as a channel opened in front of it through the ice and it moved off.

“Ready?” asked Josh.

She nodded. “Ready.”

They pulled each other up the bank and through the trees, hearts thudding. What would they find? How long
had
they been in the Kingdom of Summer?

In front of them, the fields still lay white, but the snow clouds had piled away into the north and pale sunlight gilded the snow. More than that: it was
warm
sunlight, and when they listened they could hear steady dripping as the snow and ice began to melt, but that was all; the snow itself was silent.

They set off towards the Smithy as fast as they could and Callie gave a gasp of relief when it came into view, still with the net of lights in the sky above it.

“Can you see them now?”

“Are you still seeing lights?” Josh squinted up at the sky
above the house, shading his eyes with a hand. “Nope. Still nothing. It can’t just be your eyes though. The King saw them too. What was it he said?”

“Few now have the power for a making like that.”
Callie stopped dead. “I think it was Agnes. Maybe some of the power from that feather rubbed off on her and she was able to do it.”

“Don’t you think you’d have noticed them before, in that case?” He shivered. “Come on, I’m too cold to stand still.”

They started to walk again.

“Maybe it was like a sort of burglar alarm, and it took the Winterbringers to set it off.”

“Mmmn … Still doesn’t explain why I can’t see it.”

“Maybe something from the feather got into me when I had the box in my bedroom.”

Josh looked at her sidelong. “It all sounds a bit far fetched.”

“And what we’ve just done doesn’t?”

“I’m too cold to care about lights any more. Come on.”

They ran the rest of the way, in an agony of uncertainty. Everything looked as it should, but the building probably looked more or less the same as it had done in Agnes’ time and as it would in another three hundred years.

Half frozen, they shoved open the gate, Luath barking with joy to be home. Callie fumbled for her keys but before she could find them the front door opened and Rose was looking at them in horror.

“You’re soaked! What happened? And where on earth have you been? You know you’ve been gone more than two hours? George has been out looking for you.”

Josh and Callie looked at each other and burst out laughing.