Spellfall (13 page)

“I’m not going without you,” she said firmly. “If you won’t come with me, we’ll wait here until your father finds us. Shouldn’t be too long if that hawk really is his familiar. Then we’ll see if Hunter can swallow a mouse as easily as a spider.”

Cruel, maybe, but it worked. With a fearful glance at the hound, Merlin came.

*

The silver hound led them deeper into the wood, occasionally looking over its shoulder to check they were following. Merlin grew more and more quiet as they walked. Natalie opened her mouth a couple of times to reassure him but couldn’t think of anything to say. What
did
you say to someone who had just run away from home? Even during the worst times when her dad was sobbing in the garage and Tim was being deliberately nasty, she’d never considered leaving.

“You can have my room when we get back,” she said in an attempt to cheer him up. “I’ll sleep on the sofa. It’s quite comfortable.”

Merlin gave her a startled look. But before he could say anything, the hound’s head shot up. It sniffed the air, then cleared a holly bush in a single bound and started barking joyfully.

“C’mon!” Natalie said, breaking into a run. “We’ll be home for lunch.”

Tail waving, tongue lolling, the hound waited for them in a clearing where a carpet of red-gold leaves reflected the sun like a burnished pool. The dog looked pleased with itself. But there was no sign of a human being, only a huge, twisted mossy stone with shadows writhing around it. The air was strangely still.

Natalie stopped dead, uneasy prickles working their way all over her skin. “What’s
that
?”

“The Thrallstone,” Merlin whispered, hugging himself under the trees. “I knew it’d bring us here.”

Natalie ventured closer. She noticed the leaves had been churned up by large wheels. Mud glistened in the tracks, and in the mud were footprints. Hundreds of them. She frowned. Then she remembered. “
Innocent enough to crawl through the Thrallstone,
” she murmured, and turned cold all over.

Merlin came out of his paralysis and stared at her. “Where did you hear that?”

“It was something your father said to me in the car park. I didn’t understand what he meant. But no one’s going to be crawling through that in a hurry!” Forcing herself through the strangeness, she walked up to the stone and giggled. It did have a hole in it but only a tiny one about the size of her little finger. She patted the hound, who was watching her again with those amber eyes. Then she stood on tiptoe and set her eye to the hole.

“No!” Merlin squeaked. “Don’t!”

The stone was surprisingly cold. As Natalie touched it, her hands sank into the moss. She snatched them back with a cry of surprise. Then she forgot the strange feel of the stone, Merlin’s insistence that there were such things as real spells, and even her own unease that there might be. For, lying motionless in the grass on the other side of the Thrallstone was a boy in a leather jacket, his head freshly shaven.

“Tim! It’s my stepbrother,” she said, relief tumbling through her. “He must’ve come to find me. Looks like he fell asleep!” She sprang eagerly around the stone – and stopped in confusion. She wiped her glasses and took a more careful look.

Leaves, mud, trees, dappled sunlight. No Tim!

She stepped back and peered through the hole again. Tim, lying on the ground with his head wrapped in green shadows.

She stared again at the trees on the far side then turned to Merlin. “Is this another of your silly tricks?” she whispered. “Because if it is, it’s not funny.”

Merlin crept closer, one hand cupping his mouse, nervously eyeing the Thrallstone. “I kept tryin’ to tell you but you wouldn’t listen. It’s a gateway. That’s Earthaven you can see through the hole.” He tried to peer through from where he was standing. “I’ve never seen it before, though when I was little Father kept threatening to bring me here to make me crawl through it. That’s what it means, see?
Innocent enough
. Small children and animals are supposed to fit.”

Natalie giggled, though part of her felt like screaming, or weeping hysterically, or running as far from this place as possible. “Even your mouse wouldn’t fit through there!” she said, sticking a finger into the hole to demonstrate.

Merlin sucked in his breath. Everything up to Natalie’s wrists went ice cold as the stone
shimmered,
suddenly no more solid than air. She lost her balance and stumbled forwards. There was a blinding green light, and her ears popped. She shook her head, blinked to clear her vision, and found herself staring at a tall man with the longest white hair she’d ever seen. He had his back turned and was talking to a group of men in cloaks, knives glittering in their belts. At her feet, Tim twisted and moaned as if he were having a nightmare. What she’d thought were shadows, she now saw to be a net of green and gold creepers twisting out of the ground to wrap themselves tightly around his head.

She couldn’t think where the men had come from but they obviously had something to do with whatever was hurting Tim. She hurried up to the white-haired one and grabbed his sleeve. “What are you doing to my stepbrother?” she demanded, trying to sound braver than she felt. “Let him go!”

The white-haired man whirled and stared at her in pure astonishment. Natalie had an impression of eyes full of green light set in a stern face framed by thorns. More vines and creepers curled out of a glittering haze far above and stroked his shoulders. The cloaked men were pointing to the Thrallstone, whispering excitedly, but the man she’d challenged grabbed her wrist and snapped, “How did you get through the gate? I don’t recall leaving it open.”

His nails dug into her skin, bringing tears, which she blinked away. “Let me go,” she whispered. “Or I’ll—”

She’d been going to say scream, until she realized the uselessness of it. She was in a different world. Through the gate. Merlin had been telling the truth, after all. Her knees turned weak. She closed her eyes in terror.

A sudden snarl made her open them again in time to see the old hound leap through the hole in the stone and fling itself at a second dog she hadn’t noticed amidst all the shadows. Silver fur flew as the two animals engaged in a furious battle.

The white-haired man’s eyes widened. “You!” he whispered, hastily dropping her wrist. “For Oq’s sake!” he shouted to the dogs. “K’veriyan! K’tanaqui! Stop that at once!”

They carried on fighting.

He glared at Natalie. “Call him off, you crazy girl! Don’t you know who I am? I’m Lord Pveriyan, First Member of the Council of Oq. I was the one who sent K’tanaqui to look for you, though I have to admit I didn’t anticipate quite such a fierce meeting. Still, I suppose I should have expected it of Atanaqui’s daughter.”

As soon as Natalie was free, the two hounds separated and eyed each other, growling softly. She focused on the only thing that made any sense.

“What’s wrong with Tim?” She knelt beside her stepbrother’s prone body and tried to clear the creepers away but they seemed to have penetrated Tim’s hairless scalp and wriggled beneath it. Her stomach turned queasy. She stopped pulling suddenly glad he was unconscious.

Lord Pveriyan sighed. “Don’t meddle. His memories of us must be wiped clean, otherwise we’ll have no choice but to seek him outside Earthaven when the Boundary opens, which will be painful for him and a waste of Oq’s power when we need it most.”

Natalie frowned. His words were strange, yet it was almost as if she knew what he was talking about, as if she’d learnt all this once but had forgotten it. She stared hard at the trees. They were similar to the ones in Unicorn Wood, yet subtly different as if they had all been washed or someone had painted them with brighter colours. Beyond the curling vines, invisible in the distant haze, she sensed something huge and ancient and powerful. As she gazed around, a squirrel cracked a nut somewhere above them – or maybe it wasn’t a squirrel? She looked up uneasily just as one of the hanging creepers descended with a soft rustle and began to explore Tim’s scalp.

Suddenly, it was all too much. Something snapped inside her. “Let him
go,
you stupid tree!” she yelled, grabbing the thing and pulling as hard as she could.

There was a crackle, a whiff of sugar, and all the creepers retreated, the one in her hand slipping through her fingers and recoiling into the haze, the others disappearing into the earth. She rocked back on her heels in surprise and relief. Tim still showed no sign of coming round but his breathing steadied.

“Now you’ve done it,” Lord Pveriyan said. “Hardly in Earthaven two seconds and already you’ve challenged a member of the Council and overridden my order. Now I suppose I’ve got to reconnect him. This is so tiresome. Stand back.”

Natalie stiffened. But before Lord Pveriyan could once more entwine Tim’s head in creepers, there was a green flare from the Thrallstone. With a little shriek, Merlin came stumbling through the hole, fell to his hands and knees and began patting at the grass.

“Redeye!” he called, a desperate edge to his voice. “Redeye! Come back here.”

Lord Pveriyan’s head whipped round. He crossed the distance to the stone in two swift strides, gripped Merlin’s shoulder and hissed, “
Caster.
”

Merlin scrambled to his feet. “No I’m not, Lord! I’m hopeless at casting, really I am. We haven’t come to steal your spells, I promise. We were running away from Father’s hawk and we took a wrong turn, that’s all. We’ll go back now—”

“I think not,” said the Spell Lord. “In fact, I think you’d both better come with me to see the Council. We’ve been waiting to meet Atanaqui’s daughter for quite a while now. As for you, young Caster, you can come and explain how it is you happen to be here with her. The last we heard, she’d been kidnapped.”

Merlin made a break for the stone but Lord Pveriyan was faster. He motioned to the cloaked men and one of them gripped Merlin’s elbow. The Spell Lord fired questions at the boy, which Merlin replied to in whispers. Natalie wanted to help him but a fit of shivers had come over her.

With a trembling hand, she touched the bloody hole in Tim’s ear. He’d lost his little skull earring. “Tim,” she whispered. “Wake up. Please wake up!”

“But I don’t know anything!” Merlin protested over by the Thrallstone, where he was being shaken vigorously by the cloaked man. “Father never trusted me.”

“I think we both know that’s a lie.”

“I don’t want to go with you!”

“I’m not giving you a choice. Where’s your familiar?”

Merlin paled. “Think I’d tell you?” he whispered, but his eyes slid sideways.

The Spell Lord smiled and dived into a pile of leaves between two tree roots. He emerged with the struggling mouse. Merlin moaned.

“I’ll ask you again,” snapped Lord Pveriyan. “What’s your father planning to do when he gets across the Boundary?”

“I don’t know!” Merlin said. “Really I don’t! All I know is they’ve got bows and arrows and a sack of live spells. Maybe he’s going to use ’em to transport?”

Lord Pveriyan drew a sharp breath and his hound growled. “He
transports
?”

“Yes, I thought you knew—”

“This is more serious than we thought! A transport spell could get them to the Heart of Oq and back again before the Boundary closes. We have to call the Council! Here, someone take care of this mouse. Put the human boy through the gate and leave him in the clearing. I can’t waste any more time on him. The rest of you, take Atanaqui’s daughter and the Caster to the Root System. Quickly! I’ll be along as soon as I’ve closed up here.”

“But what if he’s not fully cleansed, Lord?” one of the men ventured. “I thought Oq was having trouble?”

In answer, Lord Pveriyan’s hound snarled at the men until they hurried to obey. Natalie tried to protest as they lifted Tim but a great wave of strangeness was rushing towards her and she couldn’t even get off her knees.

It’s all true, she thought. I should be screaming, or weeping hysterically, or—

Before the wave could break, the old hound padded up, thrust his muzzle into her hand and flipped his tattered ear. She put her arms around his neck and clung to him gratefully but he wouldn’t let her bury her face into his sweet-smelling fur. As he gazed at her with those beautiful amber eyes, a barrier shattered inside her head and words formed clear as crystals.

Of courrrse it’s trrrue. Pup listen to K’tanaqui now. Pup got a LOT to learrrn.

Chapter 10

SOULTREE

Thursday afternoon, October 29

~~*~~

The cloaked men took Merlin and Natalie underground into a system of bewildering tunnels where their feet made no sound on the mossy floor. A faint green glow came from the walls, adding to the eeriness of the place. No one spoke. Staring straight ahead, Natalie walked with one hand twisted in the old magehound’s ruff. She looked pale and frightened. Merlin supposed Earthaven must be quite a shock to her after her haughty dismissal of spells. In other circumstances he might have enjoyed watching her squirm as she was forced to admit everything he’d been telling her was true. But he was having problems of his own.