Aurora (5 page)

Lily creeps down the wooden steps that lead into the heart of the burrow. She ducks the damp washing that hangs from a tree root and heads straight for her snug: a dug-out at the far end of the burrow, blocked by heavy deerskin drapes, to give her some blessed privacy.

‘Well?’ Mara steps in front of the snug, hands on hips, blocking Lily’s escape.

‘I’m
tired
,’ says Lily, avoiding her mother’s eyes.

‘Your father’s out looking for you. Where have you been?’

‘Nowhere,’ Lily mutters.

She lifts the lid of the pot on the stone stove in the centre of the burrow, and wrinkles her face at the mush of leftover root stew.

‘I trusted you to go to the lake and straight back,’ says Mara. ‘If I find out you were on Wolf Mountain with Wing, in the dark—’

Lily slams the lid back down. ‘Tuck’s sake, can’t I have a
life
?’

‘Don’t use that curse in here,’ says Mara, edgily.

‘It’s just a
word
,’ Lily retorts. ‘Some dead person’s
name
.’

Mara’s dark, steady gaze flinches at that.

‘It’s a name I don’t want to hear,’ she says firmly, after a pause.

The burrow door rattles above them and Rowan bounds down the wooden stairs.

‘Back all in one piece then?’ He blows out a great sigh of relief, then glances from Lily to Mara, reading the fraught silence between them.

‘We were worried.’ Rowan puts a calm hand on Lily’s shoulder. ‘There are winter-starved wolves out there, you know that. What were you thinking?’

‘I’ve been thinking about – about – if – if you’re . . .’ The words stutter out before she can stop them. ‘Who is
Fox
?’

Rowan’s hand drops from her shoulder. Mara steps backwards, stricken. As soon as she’s spoken Lily wishes she could swallow her own words.

No
, she thinks.
It isn’t true. It can’t be.

One of her small brothers lets out a wail. Mara turns away and pulls back the fur curtain of the snug where the little ones sleep. She lifts the toddler to soothe him and as he wraps his arms and legs around his mother, Mara sinks her face into the blond curls that are so akin to Rowan’s.

A thought slices through Lily. There is nothing about
her
that is like Rowan.

She is akin to Mara in many ways: her quick-eyed curiosity and daredevil nature; her lithe limbs, even her hands and feet, down to the shape of her fingernails and toes. But the tawny waves that ripple down her back are nothing like the silky darkness of Mara’s hair. That belongs all to herself. Or so Lily thought.

Bedtime,’ says Rowan, watching Lily with an expression she can’t read. ‘We’ll talk tomorrow. It’s the middle of the night and everyone’s tired and upset.’

He gives Lily a hug, warm and tight as ever, and his usual goodnight kiss.

Lily huddles into her nook of the burrow and listens to the moan of the wind in the trees above ground. Under the warm heap of bear furs her body surrenders to exhaustion, though her mind and thoughts whirl. But on the hinterland of sleep she hears Mara whisper; the first words she has spoken since Lily left for bed.

‘You heard what she said?’

There is a long pause. Lily feels her scalp prickle.

‘I always told you it would come out,’ Rowan murmurs at last. ‘She was bound to hear something one day. We should have told her long ago.’

The words bolt through Lily. Her eyes spring open.

Not another word is said. There is only the hiss of the stove fire as it is dampened for the night and the sounds of Mara and Rowan preparing for bed. The burrow falls quiet and still.

Lily stares into the darkness.

Can it be true? That her real father is a stranger across the world’s ocean?

She will not believe it. Rowan
is
her father. And they wouldn’t – they just couldn’t – have hidden such a thing from her all this time. If it were true, her whole life would be a lie.

Yet she knows what she saw in Wing’s face, what he told her without words. A terrible truth shone in Scarwell’s eyes too. Didn’t she glimpse it again in the uneasy glance between Molendinar and Pollock, when Lily asked about her name? And she heard it just now in the strained whispers between the two people she thought were her parents.

Does everyone else know? Even Scarwell? Everyone except herself?

But Rowan
is
her dad. He must be. No father could be more loving. Lily thinks of the special tenderness between them that always makes her feel precious, different to his rough-and-tumble love of the boys. She always thought it was because she was his only daughter. A horrible dread engulfs her now as she wonders if that gentle love might be the care you give to something that doesn’t truly belong to you.

Lily huddles deep into the bearskin and shuts her eyes tight. She never knew it was possible to feel so alone.

SIGNALS IN THE SKY

Lily rubs her cold nose and snuggles deeper under her fur quilt, trying to settle back to sleep. But something keeps niggling her, as if there’s a jaggy pine needle in her sock.

It’s not a pine needle. It’s a painful, stabbing thought.

Rowan is not my father.

Lily wakens with a nasty jolt and stares into the darkness. After a while she throws off her quilt and creeps out of her snug into the main room of the earth burrow. Stepping over wooden toys, she hears the sleepy breaths and snores of her family behind the deerskin curtains of their snugs. Easing on her furred parka, as quietly as she can, she climbs up the wooden steps set steeply in the earth and pushes open the door in the forest floor.

Outside, stars still prickle the tops of the pines. The night sky is lightening but the sun is not yet up. Lily avoids the other forest dwellers who are emerging from their burrows and runs towards the lake. Dawn mist tumbles down through the branches and when she reaches the end of the trees there is no lake or mountains, the world is blank. The mist keeps tumbling and it seems to Lily as if the sky is falling down.

‘Why did you never tell me?’ Lily demands, when Mara finds her later, shivering by the lake. ‘Why did you
lie
?’

Mara sits down on the rock beside her. Lily, furious, turns away.

‘I did try to tell you – when you were little. Don’t you remember?’

Lily shakes her head, wanting to block her ears to Mara’s low, shaky voice.

‘You got upset. You didn’t want to hear. You were such a happy little thing and Rowan was such a good dad to you. It was just –’ Mara breaks off with a guilty sigh, ‘oh,
easier
to let things be. And when you never brought it up again I thought you wanted to forget. Like I did,’ she adds, softly. ‘I only wanted us all to be happy. Time flew and you’ve grown up so fast. Last year you were still a little girl and suddenly you’re not . . . I’m sorry, Lily. I got it all wrong.’

The guilt in Mara’s voice maddens Lily. The last thing she can deal with right now is her mother’s emotions. Her own are churned up like the lake in a storm.

And there
is
a memory of running away, a long time ago, from something she didn’t want to hear. Lily remembers hiding deep in the trees, listening to Mara endlessly calling her name. It was Rowan who found her and gathered her up in his arms and brought her back home where everything was the same as it had always been. He was still her dad and the strange hurt was left buried and forgotten among the trees.

‘You were never going to mention it again?’ Lily wrenches away as Mara reaches out to her. ‘I was to live my whole life never knowing who I really am?’

‘I always thought we’d talk about it properly one day,’ says Mara. ‘I always meant to, when the time felt right. But these days your moods are all over the place and—’

‘So it’s
my
fault you never told me!’

That’s not what I mean!’

Now Mara’s voice is rising. Usually when they flare into a row Rowan will cut in with a joke and they’ll end up laughing instead of squabbling. But he’s not here, and now the thought of the man she loves like a father makes Lily feel strange.

‘What’s that?’ says Mara, and the abrupt change in her voice makes Lily look at her mother at last.

All around the lake the mountains have shrugged off the early mist. Mara is staring at the sky above the southern peaks.

‘What?’

‘That
.’

Now Lily sees a glint of silver moving across the pale sky.

‘There’s another.’ Lily points.

They watch the two silver ships speeding North.

‘Sky ships,’ Mara murmurs. ‘Only the sky cities could have such things . . . what are they doing
here
?’

Lily’s heart jolts. ‘Scarwell said my father is in a sky city.’

So
Scarwell
told you,’ says Mara bitterly.

She faces her daughter and the guilt-clouds in her eyes all burn away.

‘I don’t know where he is now,’ Mara says. ‘The sky city of New Mungo was his home. When we broke out of the city he went down to the netherworld.’

Once again, as she did when she looked at Scarwell’s beast, Lily remembers her people’s stories about the drowned ruins they once fled and tries to picture the strange netherworld beneath the sky city where her unknown father might be.

‘Why didn’t he come here with you?’ she wants to know.

‘His world sickened him. He had to change it,’ Mara answers. She takes a deep breath. ‘Fox’s grandfather, Caledon – your great-grandfather – founded the empire of sky cities. Caledon was a pioneer of Natural Engineering and he dreamed up the giant cities that saved people from the floods all over the Earth.’

Mara’s eyes shine as she watches the airships sail across the ocean of sky.

‘Caledon was a genius,’ she continues, ‘but brutal, and his empire was too. It shut out the rest of the world. Fox felt he’d be living with blood on his hands if he didn’t try to undo the wrongs of his own family. We were refugees,’ she gestures towards the forest of Candlewood and its people, ‘shut out of the cities with nowhere to live in the world. I found Fox when I was desperate – first through my cyberwizz, Granny Mary’s old computer. Somehow I found him again in the sky city. It felt like a miracle. I fell in love too fast, too young – but Fox and I, we – we had different destinies.’ Mara’s voice is hoarse, breaking now. ‘I
had
to leave him, Lily. I didn’t want to. I didn’t know until I crossed the ocean that I was pregnant with you.’

Lily is silent, numb.

‘All this,’ she says at last, ‘you kept
all this
from me?’

Mara nods, her hands clenched in her lap, knuckles white.

‘What else?’ Lily demands as the airships fade into the northern skies. ‘I want to know
everything.
You haven’t even told me my own father’s name. Fox who?’

‘His real name is David Stone,’ says Mara.

‘And he doesn’t even know I exist?’

Lily scrubs away angry tears.

‘It was the last thing I told him,’ says Mara softly. ‘We lost all contact soon after.’

‘When Tuck stole the globe,’ Lily adds curtly. ‘Wing told me. But who
was
Tuck?’

‘A young gypsea pirate who landed up with us in Ilira, on the other side of the mountains. He was all alone in the world. I thought he was my friend. Ilira was a brutal place. We had to escape. He came through the mountains with us. There was a landslide. The mountain crashed down on Tuck and he had the globe . . .’ Mara pauses. ‘I – I’d caused a great wreckage in his life. I didn’t mean to. So maybe we’re quits.’

‘What d’you mean?’ Lily presses her. ‘What did you do?’

Mara shakes her head, doesn’t answer that.

‘The globe,’ says Lily slowly, frowning, ‘is buried somewhere in the mountains.’

‘It’s
gone
, Lily.’

‘How did it work?’ Lily persists. ‘What did the globe
do
?’

‘It was my connection to the Weave – the virtual network of those old twenty-first-century computers.’