Bone Trail Read online

  Great whitewyrmes, standing on their haunches, facing each other; three on one side, two on the other. And standing a little way off, black lances planted in the loamy soil, three wyrmekin.

  Eli motioned for Cara and the others to follow him, and set out towards them, his heavy boots trampling down the grass. As they drew near, Cara saw that the wyrmes’ barbels were quivering and their jaws were parted as they talked to each other in those strange wind-and-rain words of theirs. Eli stopped, holding back a ways. He watched and listened, and the others did ­likewise.

  The two whitewyrmes’ necks were bowed low in ­supplication and their eyes glowed the palest yellow, while the eyes of the three whitewyrmes facing them were flushed an angry red. A small settler boy stood between the opposing wyrmes, looking first one way, then the other.

  Cara felt a tremor course through her body as she saw that one of the wyrmekin who stood observing was the beautiful kingirl, Thrace. On either side of her were two others. A younger girl, eight or nine years old, and a tall well-built youth with red cheeks and dark curly hair.

  ‘What are they saying?’ Ethan whispered to Eli.

  ‘The pale-eyed wyrmes are from the wyrme galleries,’ Eli said slowly. ‘They are telling the kinned wyrmes . . .’

  He paused, listening intently, his eyes half-closed in concentration.

  ‘How sorry they are that they . . . that they brought the blueblackwyrmes to this place . . .’

  He listened some more.

  ‘They are offering the wyrmes, and their kin, a home with them in the wyrme galleries . . .’ Eli went on. ‘They say they want an end to the slaughter . . .’

  The older of the two wyrmes bowed his head lower still and nuzzled the small settler child standing before him, wreathing him in smoke.

  Eli nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘What is it?’ Ethan prompted him.

  The cragclimber looked up. ‘He says these two-hides seem different. They do not look or act like hunters . . .’

  As the smoke cleared, the boy raised his head and spoke in a loud clear voice. ‘We don’t mean you no harm. My ma and me and the rest of these folks; we just want to settle, live in peace and grow our crops.’ He glanced around. ‘You whitewyrmes saved us. And we are in your debt.’

  The wyrmekin interpreted, and the older of the whitewyrmes looked down at the child before him and then across at the settlers, who were slowly gathering at a safe distance. He raised his neck and spoke in a soft windblown sigh.

  The cragclimber smiled as he translated the wyrme’s words. ‘He says there has been too much killing,’ he told the others. ‘If the colony and these kith can learn to live together, they can share the grasslands and its bounty . . .’

  At this, Cara noted, one of the three wyrmes, who was cradling an infant in its white-scaled arms, stepped forward and spoke.

  ‘A new beginning,’ Eli interpreted.

  Two of the kin – the dark-haired youth and the young girl – nodded. But Thrace, the beautiful kingirl, turned abruptly away and strode towards them. Cara’s heart thumped in her chest and Cody took a hold of her hand.

  ‘Micah?’ Thrace said to Eli, her voice harsh and croaky. ‘Where is Micah?’

  Eli’s pale-blue eyes searched the kingirl’s face, then turned to Cara. Cara swallowed nervously and was ­reassured to feel Cody’s hand squeezing her own.

  ‘Micah left us,’ she said, trembling as the kingirl turned her ferocious gaze on her. ‘He went east, into the ridges. He . . . We . . .’

  But the kingirl was no longer listening. Instead, ­kinlance in hand, she brushed past Cara and set off through the long grass towards the ridge country.

  She did not look back.

  Forty-Nine

  Nathaniel Lint the Younger leaned on his walking staff, a crooked rough-hewn length of dogwood, and ­permitted himself a smile, regretful and self-mocking.

  He was barely recognizable as the pampered young merchant who had left the new stockade with the wyrmetrain all those weeks ago. He was gaunt now, hollow-cheeked. Dirt-filled lines scored his forehead. His fine clothes, with their fur-trim and fussy lace adornments, had long since been reduced to rags; his expensive tooled leather boots had fallen to bits and the fashionable broadbrim hat he wore was now battered and shapeless, stained white at the crown with sweat.

  What a sight he must look, Nathaniel realized, with the flapping soles of his boots tied into place with strips of sun-cured wyrmehide and the ragged pelt of a greywyrme draped around his shoulders. He’d tailored it himself, spending half a day hacking it off a carcass with his knife.

  His beloved knife. With its curved blade and bone handle. It had meant the difference between life and death on the trail. He’d fought off carrionwyrmes with it, killed and gutted flitterwyrmes and plump ­squabwyrmes, and used it to fashion both the walking staff and the rudimentary cloak that protected him from the sun during the searing days and kept him warm at night.

  Nathaniel had left the wyrmetrain with two gourds of salt-spoiled water and a pack of ruined wyrmemeat that he’d abandoned on the first night. Now, here he was, three weeks later, looking across the sun-parched badlands at the lookout tower and bunkhouses of the new stockade, that shimmered in the heat haze. He had become a hardened weald traveller, or at least, with his calloused hands and brown weathered skin and the broad keen-edged knife for killing anything he needed, he sure looked like one. And how surprised Solomon Tallow would be when he found that the young merchant had survived . . .

  Nathaniel smiled to himself. When the gangmaster arrived back at the new stockade, he would be ready and waiting for him.

  He took a swig from the lighter of the two watergourds, fresh-filled three days earlier, and was about to set off again when a shadow fell across him. Nathaniel looked up, shielding his eyes from the sun, to see a whitewyrme flying low overhead.

  He threw himself down in the dust instinctively, and his hand reached for his knife. He heard steady rhythmic wingbeats and looked up to see the great whitewyrme fly on towards the new stockade. Its eyes glowed a deep blood red, and its long serpentine neck craned forward, a black zigzag scar stark against the white scales.

  It did not seem to see him.

  As he watched, the creature tilted its wings and arced down over the corrals and courtyard of the stockade which, Nathaniel now saw, was crowded with the wagons and tents of new settlers from the plains. With single-minded ferocity, the whitewyrme demolished the lookout tower with a blow from its tail, then set a hay barn ablaze with a jet of flame from its gaping jaws.

  Screams and cries floated back to Nathaniel on the hot breeze as the settlers began streaming from the tents and bunkhouses and out across the badlands. The great whitewyrme hovered over the new stockade, system­atically tearing the roofs off the buildings with its curved talons, and filling the interiors with flame. In seconds, the bunkhouses were ablaze, along with the rest of the hay barns and the great hexagonal silo.

  Nathaniel’s heart thumped in his chest. Everything he had struggled to achieve was being destroyed in front of his eyes by this crazed creature.

  It was above the tavern now, its claws ripping at the roofbeams. The gang members Tallow had left behind had spilled out into the dusty courtyard and were firing spitbolts up at the whitewyrme. But the creature ignored the wounds they were inflicting, its sinuous neck curving down and its nostrils flared as it clawed more timber from the tavern roof.

  It was searching for something, Nathaniel ­real­ized . . .

  Aseel’s nostrils quivered as they caught the deep sweet musk of flameoil. This was what he had come for.

  He clawed away wooden floorboards to reveal a small chamber at the heart of the building. It was packed with earthenware pitchers, each one stoppered with wax. Several had toppled over and smashed, and their ­contents had spread out across the floor, releasing a pungent odour.


  The thorns of the two-hides bit into Aseel’s neck and flanks, tore his wings and stung his tail, but he ignored them. With the last of his strength he reached down and smashed the rest of the pitchers with a sweep of a claw.

  This was it.

  From deep within his chest, a tumult of emotion erupted – pain and sorrow and anger and hurt. Aylsa’s voice, rainflecked with false hope for their wyve. The dead wyrmeling limp in his arms. The grief in Thrace’s eyes at their parting. The stench of death that had clung to the two-hides trapper – a stench that was spreading to the whole of the weald.

  It had to be stopped . . .

  ***

  Nathaniel saw the whitewyrme’s eyes blaze a deep ­visceral shade of red that matched the blood streaming down from the spitbolt wounds pockmarking its body. With a violent shudder, the wyrme opened its jaws wide and sent a long shimmering blade of flame roaring deep into the heart of Solomon Tallow’s quarters.

  There was a blinding flash of light as a massive fireball lit up the sky over the new stockade, and Nathaniel had to close his eyes to protect them from its dazzling glare. The sound of a colossal explosion followed moments later, rumbling across the badlands like thunder.

  When Nathaniel opened his eyes, there was no sign of the great whitewyrme.

  Or the new stockade. All that remained was a pile of charred and burning timber strewn across a blackened crater.

  A stream of settlers picked their way across the ­badlands, dazed, confused, and heading east, back towards the safety of the low plains. Nathaniel Lint watched them for a moment. Then, gathering up his walking staff and watergourds, he climbed to his feet, turned and set off in the opposite direction.

  Fifty

  He would die slowly, this youth she’d been hunting for so long. Sitting there, gazing into the embers of his campfire as the sun rose over the ridges, he had no idea that this would be the last dawn he’d see.

  The keld mistress’s bone-white fingers tightened round the handle of her knife, with its blade of polished obsidian, black and weighted and fangsharp.

  She had continued the hunt, even after the massacre on the clifftop, when she had lost her slaves and her dear, dear friends. They hadn’t stood a chance out there in the open against the kin and the wyrme. Such fighting was not the way of the keld. Crevices, caverns, the dark dank places into which enemies could be lured and dealt with at one’s leisure; that was the keld way.

  Slow. Thorough. Deadly.

  The youth prodded the dying fire with a stick, stretched, then looked up at the dawn sky.

  The keld mistress had waited for this moment through the long dark night, and all the nights before – the nights on the trail, tracking the five kith by the light of their campfires, or on the frequent occasions they went without fire, creeping close enough to listen to their whispered conversations, the sound of their breathing; quiet coughs, gentle snoring. And by day, in her tattered cloak of dust and filth, silent and stealthy as a shadow, she had followed in their footsteps, unseen and unsuspected, even by the cautious old cragclimber.

  All the while, she’d fought the urge to snatch at her revenge, to hurry the reckoning with a swift blow or an impetuous attack. No, she would do this slowly. The keld way.

  When the youth had left the others in the grasslands and returned to the ridges, she had been exultant. The wide open spaces had filled her with dread – the vaulted sky with its threat of kin; the flat undulating grass with sightlines to the horizon. She’d had to watch them from too great a distance and it had been hard. But then he’d come back to her. To the crevices and ravines; the twisting gulleys and shadow-filled ridges.

  And here he was now, the dawn light playing on his handsome face. She would remove it in due course.

  First, she would move within knife range. Approach from behind, slash the tendons behind the knee as he rose to his feet. Once down, a blow to the temple, to stun. Then, the binding. Hands, feet. Arms bent back at that excruciating angle; thumbs dislocated and ­connected to ankles by looped wyrmegut. She would drag him to the cave in the ravine. It was shallow, little more than an overhang, but it was dark and hidden and would suit her purpose.

  And then she would begin . . .

  The keld mistress licked her lips as she rose silently to her feet and crept towards the youth. There was a soft sighing noise, moist-sounding, and the keld mistress felt a sudden intense pain. The sharp metallic taste of blood – her blood – filled her mouth as she looked down.

  The shaft of a black kinlance was sticking out of her chest, its tip wet and glistening. The polished obsidian knife clattered to the ground.

  So, this is how I die, the keld mother thought, her lips twisting into a rictus smile. Quickly.

  Fifty-One

  ‘Thrace,’ Micah murmured, his voice trembling and weak.

  A wizened, white-haired hag lay face down on the rock between them, blood seeping out from beneath her ragged cloak and pooling at Thrace’s feet. A polished stone knife reflected back the glow of the dying campfire, the embers flashing orange then black, and the last pale yellow flames dancing on the nubs of the charcoaled sticks.

  ‘This keld was about to kill you,’ Thrace said. The words felt blunt and strange in her mouth, so different from the soft murmurings of wyrmetongue. ‘I followed your trail from the grasslands, and when I found you, I found her . . .’

  Micah looked down at the body, then back at Thrace. Her corn-silver hair hung down, gleaming, straight, casting her face in shadow. The suit of soulskin clung to her body, pale and opalescent in the dawn light, while gripped in her hands the kinlance was black as night, its tip wet with keld blood.

  The keld.

  They had dogged Micah’s footsteps throughout his time in the weald - Red Myrtle the cavern hag, the ­monstrous winter caller, the hideous gang that had infected the sanctuary of Deephome. And the keld raiding party which Kesh and Azura had massacred at the top of the rocky outcrop.

  Micah rolled the corpse over with the toe of his boot. He stared down at the white face.

  This was the keld who had thrown the grenade that killed Kesh. But it was Eli and him she’d been after. Must have been. Why else would she have tracked him here, her stone knife poised over him as he sat alone and unsuspecting staring into the embers of the fire?

  Micah stepped over the body and stood in front of Thrace. By rights, he should be dead now – would be dead if it hadn’t been for this kingirl.

  He loved her, body and soul, and had done since the first moment he had set eyes on her as she lay, helpless and injured, at the foot of the highstack back in the valley country. But he knew his love for her was hopeless. After all, she was kin – savage, strange, unknowable; at one with the great whitewyrme she rode. Aseel would always come first.

  Even during Thrace and Micah’s time together in the winter den, Micah had known she wasn’t truly his. And when Aseel had returned, Thrace had left with him, just as Micah had feared she would.

  And so he had tried to forget her. Maker knew, he’d tried! And he thought he’d succeeded, with Cara. Sweet trusting Cara, who had loved him with all her heart – until she realized that he couldn’t forget Thrace. The kingirl had haunted his dreams and invaded his waking thoughts, and always would.

  But it was still hopeless. Micah knew that. And yet, as he looked at Thrace now, standing before him, he could do nothing to prevent the old familiar ache from stirring in his chest.

  ‘You followed my trail from the grasslands?’ he said. ‘But why?’

  Thrace lowered her head, her hair falling over her face like a veil.

  ‘Aseel left me,’ she said. ‘And he will not return.’

  Micah saw a shudder pass through her body. She lowered the bloodied kinlance and leaned on it for support.

  ‘He told me he was going to destroy the settlement in the badlands, whatever the cost. He no longer cared
about his own life.’

  She looked up, the ash-gold hair parting to reveal her stricken face.

  ‘He would not take me, even though I would willingly have died with him – and I understood the reason . . .’

  Micah stared back at her, trying to read the look in her eyes, a mixture of pain and sorrow, and a strange ­exaltation.

  ‘That’s why I followed your trail from the grasslands,’ she said. ‘Why I had to find you, Micah. Why we have to be together, you and I . . .’

  ‘Why?’ Micah asked.

  Thrace reached out and drew Micah to her. She smiled and her face softened, her eyes wistful and bright. She took Micah’s hand and placed it on the gentle swell of her belly.

  ‘Because of this,’ she said.

  ‘A child,’ Micah breathed.

  Thrace nodded. ‘Our child.’

  A Biography of Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell

  Chris Riddell and Paul Stewart lived curiously parallel lives before they met. Both went to South London grammar schools in the seventies, moved to Brighton in the eighties, and had children in the nineties. They have sons, as well as daughters, who are the same age. Paul and Chris could have met at any point during these years.

  As a schoolboy, Chris played rugby on school playing fields directly behind Paul’s childhood home in Morden, a suburb of London. In 1982, both of them attended a gig in Brighton by an obscure post-punk band called Young Marble Giants. The band didn’t show up and Paul might have been standing behind Chris in the queue for refunds. They can’t be sure. They also both spent the summer of 1987 in New York with their wives, though strangely, in a city of eight million people, they didn’t run into each other.

  But one thing is certain. After years of almost crossing paths, the two finally met at the gates of the Early Years nursery school on the Ditchling Road while picking up their two-year-old sons.

  Chris was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1962, and was immediately whisked off by his parents to live in a succession of large, bitterly cold vicarages in remote corners of England. His career as an illustrator began in a church pew in Bristol where, each Sunday during his father’s sermons, he would draw pictures of fire-breathing dragons and knights getting their heads cut off in exchange for winegum candies fed to him by an elderly member of the congregation, Mrs. Stock.