Fell (The Sight 2) (10 page)

Alina dropped the stones and ran over to Ivan, helping the old man towards a boulder, where they both sat down heavily. Alina remembered gratefully how he had spoken up for her amongst the villagers.

“Your legs are strong, WovenWord,” he panted, sucking at the air and looking at his young friend admiringly, “and your lungs able to cope with this thinning air. It’s good. Though not for an old fool like me. I’ve been following you since you escaped.”

“But what are you doing here, Ivan?” said Alina.

“No time,” answered the shepherd, between his strained breaths. “They’re close again. I’ve been using my tracks to lead them astray these last three days, but they’ve split into two, Barbat and Malduk, and there’s only one way up the mountain now. Half the group are set on this course too. Malduk’s.”

“But Ivan …”

“Hush, child, and listen carefully. I know you didn’t do it, but I’ve never seen Malduk so intent on anything in all his life, nor the villagers as thick as thieves. There’s been a skirmish in the valley with Turks, which has distracted many of the soldiers, but the villagers hunt you ceaselessly, with cries of changeling on their lips. Driven on by Malduk.”

“If they’re so close, I’ll never make it up there,” said Alina desperately, looking towards the col.

“No, you won’t. But go that way and you might have a chance. See that little path?” The old shepherd pointed up between two rocks on the side of the culvert. “It’s an old deer track I used to take often in my youth, when I roamed these hills without a care in the world. It leads straight up, and then out onto the ice field.”

“Ice field?” gulped Alina.

“That’s the only way you’ll be able to escape them,” said Ivan, his face darkening with the very thought of it. “On the ice field above, though it can be slippery, you’ll leave no tracks, and I doubt they’d follow you there anyway. It’s full of fissures and pitfalls, so you must be very careful. Night is coming, but don’t stop, and whatever you do, don’t fall asleep. Sleep is the bitter accomplice of the cold.”

Old Ivan stood and handed Alina his crook, with its fine carved top.

“Take this,” he said gravely, “and use it to prod and test the ground before you. There are many places to fall, so keep your eyes and your senses open. But trust too, in His power.”

Ivan crossed himself and Alina clasped the crook almost proudly, although she wished it had been given to her in happier circumstances.

“If you can cross the ice field safely,” said Ivan, “you’ll be able to get down into the next valley, and then over the mountains proper. There’s a village far beyond them to the north, over three mountain passes, if I recall, at the end of a wide valley. They call it the valley of Baba Yaga.”

Alina’s eyes opened in amazement at the name. A name to conjure within a fairy tale.

“A great cairn crowns the mountain at the valley entrance and below it a wooden church by a little lake. A blacksmith I know lives near there. His name is Lescu and he was once a great soldier—the Warrior Smith, they called him in his day. That man will help you, I know it, if you tell him Ivan sent you.”

“Thank you, Ivan.”

“But be honest with him. Tell him only the truth, WovenWord. The truth is your greatest ally now. No more lies, eh, girl?”

“Girl?” gasped Alina, stepping back and steadying herself with the crook. “Then, you know? You’ve known all along I’m a girl.”

“Not all along, Alina,” answered the old man softly. “It’s a pretty name. But I began to suspect when your voice didn’t change, and no hair grew on your chin. The others thought it was because you are younger than your years, as you tell them, but I remember Malduk saying you were eight when they found you, and I did the calculation from the time you came here. I’ve noticed other things too about the changes in you.”

Alina blushed.

“And many times when the others have been on the point of guessing, I’ve protected your secret. A changeling secret, stranger than any tale of goblins. I told them that you wouldn’t wash with us because of a scar you had, and that you are thin because Malduk and Ranna starved you, though heaven knows that’s true enough.”

“Oh, Ivan,” said Alina gratefully, realising there was no time to tell him the truth of who she now suspected she might really be. “I wish I could have shared my secret with you all along. Yet so many secrets surround me now.”

“There are many strange things about you indeed,” said Ivan, nodding thoughtfully. “I’ve always known it. It’s not just what you’ve been hiding from the shepherds, or that mark on your arm. It’s some quality you have, whether changeling or not. May God protect you, my girl, but you must protect yourself too. They hunt you like a man now, and in some things you must learn to act like one, but never forget your true nature, and use your wits and cunning too. It’s not just Malduk and the villagers you have to fear, now that your hiding is at an end.”

Alina thought her hiding was only just beginning.

“What do you mean, Ivan?”

“The winter begins, and the wild animals are hungry and frightened. There are other hunters than people out there. Bear and mountain lynx. Wolves.”

Alina looked back nervously.

“A wolf,” she whispered. “I’ve dreamt of a black wolf recently, like the one they were talking about that night. Though I didn’t summon it, I swear.”

The old shepherd looked into her face and his eyes shone.

“Have you indeed? Well, perhaps it has some meaning. They say dreams can have deep meanings, though I don’t know the truth of such magic.”

“Magic?” whispered Alina sadly, thinking of all the powers she had wanted as a changeling, and feeling very vulnerable. “There isn’t any magic in the world, Ivan. Only cruelty and hate.”

“Isn’t there, WovenWord?” said Ivan. “Well, perhaps we’ll see.” Ivan smiled. “Here,” he added suddenly, thrusting his pack at the girl. “There’s food and water in there, a knife and a good, warm woollen shirt. My own shirt. And something else you may need.”

Alina took it gratefully and looked sadly at her old friend, as she transferred her meagre things from her own pack into his, and he watched like a father sending a child out into the world.

“Now go, Alina. I’ll take your pack and cover your tracks. When they come, I’ll say that I saw you lower down the mountain.”

“Will they believe you? Isn’t it dangerous, Ivan?”

“Many respect me,” answered the brave old shepherd. “And the last thing they’d dare to call me is a liar.”

Ivan winked.

“Now go, girl.”

Alina had slung the pack over her shoulder in the moonlight.

“And, Alina, don’t believe that the whole world is like this. It isn’t.”

Her heart was full to bursting, and she hated to leave Ivan, but Alina knew this was her last chance to escape. She thanked him with all her heart and turned away. Already in the foothills below, they could hear the voices of barking dogs coming closer and closer. Malduk and the hunters were near.

“Go, Alina. Hurry.”

So she began to climb, hard, up the deer track, higher and higher towards the heavens, and although the path was as thin and winding as a skein of drawn wool, made naturally over the years by the endless movement of red deer, following one another’s slots through the hard landscape, to the changeling it was like a magic carpet in the coming night, through the snow and stone.

Alina felt the air about her grow thinner and colder as the darkness came in, and above her head great swagging mountains of storm-laden cloud began to gather in the sky. A mist came in with the darkness, wisping about her head like a ghost, but shielding her too from any watchers below.

Alina felt as if she were rising towards heaven itself, and wondered if she were already dead, murdered by Malduk and Ranna in her humble manger, and was being carried away on a ghastly dream. But then she heard the hungry voices of the dogs below, pursuing her still, and felt the cold air draw her skin like the covering of a drum, sending pricks of pain into her lungs as she breathed. Alina knew only too well then that this was real and she was not dead at all, but that wherever she was going, it was death indeed that was facing her now.

At last the thin deer track brought her to the top of the steep slope though, and as she crested the summit, she gasped in utter astonishment. Before Alina Sculcuvant, in the shining moonlight breaking through the mist, lay a great sweeping island of white. Except that through the covering of snow, strange colours flashed in the landscape, and the ground before her seemed in places rucked like a folded sheepskin. It was the ice field.

Alina felt a blast of cold come off it that nearly knocked her over, for beneath its snowy shroud the ground before her was pure ice, a frozen river, two hundred feet deep in places and far deeper in the places where the mountain fissured. By the action of its bitter cold, it hardened any snow falling on top of the glacier, and as soon as Alina reached its edge, the girl realised that Ivan had been right, for her footprints made no impression on the surface at all, and thus would leave no trace for her hunters.

Alina stopped to open Ivan’s pack. She was deeply glad of the shirt that she now put on under Malduk’s coat; it warmed her immensely, and she was delighted to find four apples, a little haunch of venison wrapped in a cloth, and a little leather bag filled with water. But along with a sharp knife there was something else of great use in the pack: a pointed stick and, tied to it with string, another flat bit of wood, with a half hole in it. They were the tools that Ivan used to rub together carefully with kindling, to make sparks to light his fires in the fields.

Alina looked around and noticed a little log nearby. There was just room enough in the pack to add it too, which she did, then Alina drank some water in the darkness and, hearing the dogs again, wasted no time, but walked up and out onto that brilliant expanse of ice.

It was with a terrified awe that she did so, not only because the girl found herself so small in the gigantic landscape, dwarfed by the icy immensity of the glacier, or because she was being hunted like a hare and the sounds told her that her pursuers were hard on her heels, but because she seemed to have entered a kingdom of strangely brutal beauty, and one that called instantly to some older and deeper instincts in the girl.

Alina realised that her strength and wit alone would help her to survive out here, and somehow it connected her to a power, or a force, she felt far greater than herself. Although she had little time for churchgoing in Moldov, Alina found herself making the sign of the cross too, just as Ivan had done.

But if Alina had hoped to invoke the almighty himself to her aid, she soon found that no one was on her side. For in the heavens the clouds were massing, and a bitter wind came up over the glacier, screeching in her ears like a night witch and grabbing the hardened snow in great fistfuls and hurling it in her face.

Time and again she was nearly blown over by the icy blasts, and she quickly found herself stumbling, her hands turning red and then blue as they met the snow. Alina soon wished she had not picked up the log at all, for it made her pack far heavier to carry.

Her eyes began to water, then sting like firebrands in the blast, but the worst of it was listening to the dreadful sounds wrapped up inside the hunting wind, for the storm that had come up seemed to have a thousand voices in it. Some called like evil demons; others wailed like lost and anguished souls; some seemed to cry out a terrible warning, like goblins indeed, or the voice of an ancient god demanding vengeance. “Traitor!” the raging wind seemed to cry after her. “Traitor!”

Alina wished she could drink that potion again, if not to hide her from the fairies, then at least to give her warmth, and as she pressed on she remembered Ivan’s words about the ice field and began to imagine endless unseen pitfalls in the ground ahead of her.

With nearly every step she prodded the ground with Ivan’s great crook. Mostly it hit the hard snow and ice, and Alina went on safely, but more and more, as she climbed higher up the huge glacier, she found the crook suddenly sinking into the snow, and she would have to skirt the sudden drift, testing and poking to find its edge with the staff, to be sure of not disappearing inside.

It made Alina’s progress painfully slow, as did the cruel wind and the fact that she could hardly see anything around her in the blizzard. She was soon exhausted, and every muscle in her body seemed to ache with the searching cold. As Alina shuddered and went on, the voices in the wind seemed to be inside her head.

She had just managed to skirt another deep drift, when Ivan’s staff plunged straight downwards and, to Alina’s horror, a great slab of snow vanished right in front of her. There seemed to be a hole in the ground itself, for as the girl peered down she was looking at a great well of ice, which caught the voice of the wind and threw it back at her in a mournful bellow that seemed to call her name. “Aleeeeenaaaah.”

Alina swung up her head and cried out furiously, turning her face into the angry wind.

“Stop it,” she screamed. “Leave me alone. Why won’t you leave me alone?”

But the storm wouldn’t leave her alone, and as she turned her head and looked back, a sudden break in the mist showed her not only how slow her progress had been, but what she was sure were figures on the edge of the glacier. Then on the air, as the break in the blizzard closed again like a trap, she caught another note on the wind, a kind of howling.

Alina told herself it was the wind, skirted the hole, and scrambled on, then tripped and fell on her face in the darkness, picked herself up and fell again. She cursed bitterly and started to cry, and she kept jabbing angrily at the snow with the crook, as if trying to harm the monstrous white itself. But Alina soon realised the futility of such an act, and how it was tiring her out even more. With that she heard a clear howl through the storm.

“What’s that?” she whispered, turning her head in the blizzard.

Alina saw a shape through the snow, darting by to her right. She screwed up her eyes, but shook her head. It must have been a rock, seemingly made to move by the swirling snowflakes or the drifting moonlit clouds, and now it was gone again. The howl had been nothing but the storm. On Alina went, and then she thought she saw the shape again, ahead of her this time. A moving smudge of black.