Swift (33 page)

‘That’s not true!’ Ivy shouted at her. ‘How can you be so blind? The piskeys of the Delve are your responsibility, and most of them have faery as well as piskey blood, just like I do. They need you to give them their freedom, not sit there and watch them die so you can stay in power!’

Betony slapped her across the face.

Cicely shrank back, and Mica started halfway to his feet as Ivy and her aunt stared at each other, both of them breathing hard. Then with deadly softness the Joan spoke: ‘For generations we piskeys have poured our lives into this mine. We have made it a place of beauty and strength, our people’s greatest pride. It protected us from the spriggans while they lived, and since then it has hidden us from the Empress and her servants. It is safe, it is secure – and most of all, it is secret. That is how our people have survived so long.

‘But when this faery, this stranger, appeared in our midst, you forgot all of that. You disobeyed my order to stay away from the prisoner, and allowed him to seduce you into setting him free. What did he offer you, to make you believe you could trust him? Did he tell you he would shower you with treasure, and make you his queen?’

A spasm of nausea gripped Ivy’s throat. ‘No. What makes you think I would want –
no
.’

‘Then what?’

She couldn’t lie, much as she wanted to. ‘He said he would teach me to fly.’

Betony regarded her for a few seconds in astonishment, then threw back her head and laughed. ‘And you believed him?’

But horror was dawning on Mica’s face, and Ivy knew he’d finally put the pieces together: their conversation about shape-changing, the swift he’d marked out as an impostor and felled with one deadly stone, the way Ivy had vanished when he and Flint needed her most.

Don’t say it
, Ivy begged him silently.
If you ever loved me at all, don’t tell her that I can change shape.

For one last moment Mica held her gaze. Then abruptly he got up and walked to the far side of the cavern. He braced his hands against the wall and bent his head between them, and he did not look back.

‘Your brother is ashamed of you,’ said Betony. ‘As he should be.’ She raised her voice, pronouncing each word distinctly as she went on, ‘You have admitted to consorting with a servant of the Empress, and releasing him against my orders. You left the Delve on several occasions without permission, and enticed an innocent child to follow your example. You revealed your piskey nature to a human girl – whom you then brought into the Delve. Any one of those crimes would be worthy of severe punishment, but all together, there can be no question that you deserve to die.’

Cicely whimpered. Mica turned, but he didn’t speak. Ivy stood unmoving, staring straight ahead as the Joan continued:

‘But you are my brother’s daughter, and you and Mica and Cicely are the last of our family line. For the sake of Flint’s memory, and because of what you did to destroy the faery Gillian and undo her spells, I will not have you executed. But it is clear you have little respect for my authority
,
and that if I allow you to remain you will spread sedition among my subjects. So…’ She drew herself up. ‘I banish you from the Delve, now and forever. Go where you wish and call yourself what you will, but you are no longer a piskey.’

‘No!’ cried Cicely, leaping off the sofa and throwing her arms around Ivy. ‘You can’t! She didn’t mean me to follow her out of the Delve, she was trying to find our mother. And she saved your life – all our lives!’

‘Cicely, get away from her,’ said Mica, striding over. ‘Don’t be a little fool.’

‘No!’ Cicely shouted at him. ‘You can stay here and poison yourself to death if you want, but I won’t!’ She turned pleading eyes up to Ivy. ‘Take me away with you. Please. I want to see Mum again.’

Ivy looked at the Joan, whose face might have been chiselled out of granite. ‘Let me take Cicely,’ Ivy said, ‘and I won’t fight you. We’ll leave the Delve together, and you can tell everyone we went to live with Marigold.’

‘Very well,’ said Betony. ‘But you’ll go at once, without speaking to anyone. And you’ll take nothing with you.’ She turned to Mica. ‘If you wish to prove your loyalty, son of Flint, you’ll see to that.’ Then she stalked out the door and slammed it behind her, the day-lamps flickering in her wake.

Cicely hid her face against Ivy and burst into tears. Mica stood awkwardly for a moment, then put out a hand and patted his little sister’s hair.

‘You’ll look out for them, won’t you?’ Ivy asked him. ‘Mattock and Jenny and the others.’ Even if he was too disgusted with Ivy to even look at her any more, even if he was determined to stay in the Delve at any cost, he must know that their mother hadn’t been lying about the poison in the mine. He was the only one who could help the piskeys now.

But Mica didn’t reply. He walked to the door and held it open. ‘You’d better get moving,’ he said gruffly. ‘You’ve got a long way to go.’

Sunlight warmed the treetops, and the sky was untroubled by cloud. Ivy glided over the countryside, swift-wings outstretched on the breeze. She and Cicely had been staying with Marigold for three days now, and though Ivy hadn’t minded looking after her sister and showing her the sights of Truro, she’d been longing all the while to fly again.

She hadn’t told either of them about her shape-changing. Male faeries might be accustomed to transforming themselves into birds or animals, but it seemed that females had a different approach to magic, and she feared that even Marigold wouldn’t be comfortable with the revelation that her daughter could become a swift.

So what was Ivy now – a piskey, or a faery, or neither? Would she ever find a place where she belonged? Ivy didn’t know, and it pained her. Especially since it had already become clear that a one-bedroom flat was too small for three, and that feeding two growing daughters was straining Marigold’s resources to the limit.

But Ivy was still too young to live and work on her own, even if she’d felt confident enough posing as a human to try. And she couldn’t ask Molly for help, not when she and her father were still grieving…

The shadow of a crow flashed over Ivy, and with a flick of her wingtips she increased speed, leaving the bigger bird behind. It offered no threat to her, but part of her would scarcely have minded if it had. At least that would have given her a challenge to surmount, an enemy that she could defeat. At least that might have made her feel not quite so useless.

Soon another bird rose up on her left side – only a small one, but Ivy had no desire for company. She angled away, catching an updraught so she could be alone again. But the newcomer followed, easily matching her speed. She was about to put the other bird in its place with an angry shriek, when it chirruped at her, rolled over and tagged her with one outstretched foot in a very un-birdlike way. Then it dived towards the riverbank, came to a fluttering stop – and transformed into a slim, angular faery with blond hair falling into his eyes.

Ivy’s heart swelled with incredulous delight. So she and Molly had been right to use their blood on him, back in Gillian’s workshop – though why it had worked, she couldn’t imagine. She veered through the air and skimmed to land in front of him in her own shape. ‘Richard! I thought you were trapped forever!’

‘So did I, for a while,’ he replied. ‘But it appears that all the magic I put into healing you makes us kinfolk of a sort after all. There’s a precedent, but I won’t embarrass you with the details.’ He gave his sly smile. ‘So you got my message, then?’

‘What? Oh.’ He must mean the dream-message he’d sent her while he was trapped. She didn’t have the heart to tell him how fragmented and misleading those words had been, or how little difference they had made in the end. ‘Yes. I’m sorry it took us so long to set you free.’

‘I didn’t think anyone could.’ He was serious now, his grey eyes sober as she had ever seen them. ‘It appears that I owe you my life. Again.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Ivy, blushing a little. ‘I never repaid you properly for saving me from Mica, and you only got trapped in the Claybane because you were trying to find Cicely for me. If anything I’m in your debt, not the other way around.’

‘Tell me the rest of your story, then, and we’ll call it even.’ He motioned to the grassy bank beside him, inviting her to sit. ‘I had part of it from Molly, but she told me you’d gone back to the Delve. What brings you here?’

She sat down cross-legged by the river’s edge and told him everything, her restless fingers tearing up the long grass around her until her hands were sticky with its sap. She told Richard how she’d defeated Gillian and rescued the piskeys she’d trapped, about going with her sister into exile, and all that had happened since.

‘But I don’t know what to do,’ she finished. ‘I can’t keep living with my mum – there’s not enough room, and Cicely needs her more than I do. And I can’t return to the Delve, not while Betony’s still in control.’

With an expert flick of the wrist Richard sent a stone skipping across the water; it bounced three times before it sank. ‘Why not try the other half of your ancestry?’ he said. ‘There must be a wyld somewhere that would take you in, if you made yourself useful.’

Ivy had considered that idea, but the thought of walking into a group of strange faeries and asking to join them, especially now that she knew what her piskey ancestors had done to their kind, made her uneasy. ‘If I did,’ she asked, ‘would you come with me?’

‘Not an option.’ He picked up another stone, turning it slowly in his fingers. ‘You see, I’m a fugitive from justice at the moment.’

Ivy was startled. ‘What for?’

‘Murder. Or actually, two murders.’ With another flick, the pebble became a silver dagger; he stabbed it point-down into the grass. ‘Last April I killed the Empress and her would-be successor in front of about five hundred other faeries. And I’ve been running ever since.’

‘
You
killed the Empress? But how? I mean – why?’ No, that wasn’t the right question either; both those answers were obvious already. ‘What happened?’

‘Ask Marigold. She saw me do it. And she was glad.’

And were you? Ivy almost asked, but she knew the answer to that question as well. If he’d taken any pleasure in killing the Empress, it hadn’t lasted long.
Is there a murderer here? No. I am…

‘Are you afraid of me?’ asked Richard. He spoke lightly, as though he were indifferent to the answer. Only a slight twitch in his cheek said otherwise.

Ivy considered this. ‘No.’

‘You might want to think a little longer about that,’ he said. ‘The Claybane worked on me, remember…and whoever my parents were, I very much doubt that either one of them was a piskey. I’m no good with horses, but I admit to being quite interested in treasure, and I seem to have a way of influencing air currents, not to mention probabilities…’

That startled a laugh out of Ivy. ‘You mean that after all this, you really
are
a spriggan?’

‘Part spriggan, anyway. I don’t see what else I could be.’ He pulled the dagger out of the bank, flipped it back into a pebble, and let it drop. ‘I always knew I wasn’t quite like other faeries, but I never knew why. Now I wonder where I came from, and if there’s anything – or anyone – left to go back to.’

‘We could try and find out,’ said Ivy.

Richard gave her a sidelong look. ‘Are you offering to come with me?’

Ivy picked a few more blades of grass and let them flutter away on the wind. At last she said, ‘I want to help my people. But I don’t know how, not yet. I need to learn. I need to travel. I need to find something that will make Aunt Betony listen to me – or convince the others that they ought to listen even if she won’t.’ She turned back to him. ‘So yes, I would like to come. If that’s all right.’

One corner of his mouth turned up. ‘If it’s what you want, I know better than to try and stop you. But it won’t be comfortable. Or safe. And I can’t tell you where we’ll be going.’

‘That’s all right. I don’t have anywhere particular in mind.’ She gave him a tentative smile and added, ‘And you can teach me more about birds on the way.’

He rose slowly, dusting off his trousers, and looked down at her a moment. Then he said, ‘We can start with the house martin. That’s the bird I shape most often. And it’s also my name. Martin.’

‘Good,’ said Ivy, taking the hand he offered and letting him pull her to her feet. ‘Richard didn’t really suit you, anyway.’

Heartfelt thanks to my smart, insightful and always encouraging editor, Sarah Lilly, and the rest of the Orchard Books team; to my ever-supportive American agent Josh Adams and my savvy and hardworking UK agent Caroline Walsh; and to illustrator Rory Kurtz, who did such a wonderful job of bringing Ivy’s character to life on the cover.

I’m also grateful to Fritha Lindqvist and Jessica Smith at Orchard for their hard work and delightful company on my UK tour in early 2011 – and to all the schoolchildren, teachers and librarians who showed such a keen interest in my books and made every school visit during the tour a pleasure.

Swift
would not be what it is if not for the unfailing support, shrewd insights, and generous assistance of the following individuals, who gave me feedback on the early drafts: Peter Anderson, Erin Bow, Deva Fagan, Meg Burden, Brittany Harrison, Saundra Mitchell, Kate Johnson and Nick Jessee. I also greatly appreciated the help of Brittany Landgrebe, who suggested the title two years ago and started the whole process; Thu Ya Win, whose photos and insights about Truro were invaluable in helping me develop that section of the book; and of Michelle Minniss, who graciously read over the whole manuscript to make sure I’d got various Cornish details right.