The road to the Thornwood runs along the river, and the river runs along the road, and for two days that’s all there is.
Flat. Grey. Reeds on one side, mud on the other, and the fog thinning out behind us until, around midday, I looked back and there was no fog at all. Just sky. I’d never seen that much sky. It made me feel like something might drop out of it.
Skritch hated it.
“Too dry,” he said, about every hundred paces. “Too bright. Too big. Where’s the top?”
“There isn’t a top. It’s the sky.”
“Skritch says no.”
In the end he walked in the river. Just got in, coat and all, and swam along beside us with his head out, which he said was better, and which meant that every time Ilsa or I said anything he’d come up the bank dripping to answer it and then go back in.
Ilsa had a bag. I’d noticed the bag at the gate, and I noticed it more as the day went on, because it clinked.
“What’s in there?”
“Supplies.”
“What kind of supplies?”
She stopped, opened it, and showed me. Three glass jars, packed in straw. Two of them had rain going on inside, grey and busy, little drops running down the inside of the glass. The third was full to the top with snow.
“From the spell-market,” she said. “You crack them and the weather comes out. I thought: we’re going somewhere with a lot of trees, and I set things on fire. So. Rain.”
“And the snow?”
“The snow was cheap.”
“What did you pay with?”
She closed the bag. “Don’t ask,” she said, and we walked on.
That night we made a fire in the reeds where the road bent away from the water, and after we’d eaten the fish (Skritch’s fish, raw, which I’m not going to talk about), I did something I hadn’t planned to do.
I took the map out, and I tore it in half.
Along the old tear, where Aldo had done it. It came apart like it wanted to. I held the right half out to Ilsa.
“What’s that for?”
“Aldo split it so they couldn’t get it all at once. So do we. You carry that one. I carry this.”
She looked at the paper. Then she looked at me, and she didn’t say anything clever, which was how I knew it mattered to her. She folded it very small and put it in the inside pocket of her coat, the one that wasn’t burnt, and buttoned it.
“Right,” she said, a bit too loud. “Practice.”
Practice went like this. Ilsa cast, I caught, I threw it in the river. Two goes, then a wait with my hands in my armpits, then two more, until my right hand was white and my left wasn’t far behind. It was getting easier. Not the cold. The cold’s never easier. But the grab. I didn’t have to close my fist like I was catching a wasp any more. I could just sort of reach, and they’d come.
Then Ilsa did a thing.
“Hold your hand out,” she said. “Flat. Palm up.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
I held it out. She put her own hand over mine, palm down, an inch above, and said the word, and the flame stood up between us, between her palm and mine.
Then she let it go. Not the way she usually did. Slowly. Like she was setting something down.
The flame went out. And the sparks didn’t lift up. They sank. They came down onto my palm like snow, gold and soft, and I didn’t grab, I just let them land.
And they were warm.
I don’t mean not-cold. I mean warm. Like holding a cup of tea in both hands on a bad morning. They sat in my palm and glowed, and I closed my hand on them, and there was the fire, the same apple of it as always, and my hand felt fine.
I looked at it. Ilsa looked at it.
“Did that hurt?” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
I threw it in the river, and we did it again the ordinary way, her casting and me grabbing, and the cold came up my arm like it always did. Then her way again. Warm.
“Weird,” I said.
“Everything about you is weird,” said Ilsa.
And we left it there. I had a lot on. I walked right past it.
The ferry was at midday on the second day.
The river gets wide there. Wide and slow and brown, a good hundred paces across, and on the far side the road went up a bank and straight into the trees.
I’d never seen the Thornwood. I’d heard about it my whole life. It was still a shock. The trees on that bank weren’t like the ones I knew from the hill, with their nice green leaves. They were black. Black trunks, black branches, and the branches had thorns on them, big ones, like something had grown a lot of knives. The road went in under them and the dark swallowed it ten paces in.
“Lovely,” said Ilsa.
The ferry was a flat wooden raft with a rail, tied up at a post on our side. The ferrywoman sat on it with her sleeves rolled up and arms like a blacksmith’s. She looked at us, three kids and one of them an otter in a coat, and didn’t say anything about it, which I liked her for.
“Penny each,” she said. “Sit in the middle. Don’t lean.”
There was no rope across. No pole. When we were on, she stood at the back rail, put one hand flat on the water, and said a word.
The river pushed.
That’s what it felt like. A big slow hand under the raft, shoving it out from the bank, and the water behind us humping up blue-grey. And over the ferrywoman’s hand, as the push faded, the sparks. Blue ones. Deep blue, like the sea on a cold day, turning slowly in the air.
I’d never seen blue ones. I reached without thinking.
Cold. But a different cold. Not fire-cold, which bites. This was heavy, and wet, and it filled my hand like I’d scooped it full of sea.
I looked at what I was holding. Not fire. A blob of water. Hanging in my fist in a ball, clear and wobbling, not dripping, not falling.
I threw it, because you have to throw them.
It hit Skritch in the face.
He sat there with it running off his whiskers and looked at me with his black eyes.
“Skritch says no,” he said.
“Sorry.”
“Skritch says very no.”
The ferrywoman pushed again. Then again. We were halfway across, with the black trees getting bigger, and I was watching the blue sparks over her hand and thinking river, that’s river, I can hold river, when the raft stopped.
Not slowed. Stopped. Like it had hit a wall.
The ferrywoman said something she probably said a lot. She put her hand down and pushed. The raft didn’t move.
Then it lifted.
The whole back end of it, up, a foot, two feet, and the water under it went black and solid, and I saw a back. A long, wet, black back, thick as a barrel, going past under the raft like a street going past. On and on. It didn’t stop. It went on for longer than the raft was.
“Eel,” said the ferrywoman, in a very flat voice. “Big one. Hold the rail.”
The raft came down with a smack. Water came over the side. Ilsa was already up with fire in her hand, and the river beside us opened and a head came out.
I’m going to describe it once and then I’m not going to think about it again. A head the size of a wheelbarrow, grey-black, slick, with a mouth that went round the sides, and teeth in the mouth like broken glass, and eyes that weren’t looking at anything. It came up and it came over, like it was going to lie down on top of us.
Ilsa threw her fire. Not through me. Just her, a flame off her palm straight into its face. It was a good one. Not small.
The eel went under.
“Push!” I yelled. “Push, push—”
The ferrywoman pushed. Blue sparks. I grabbed them with my right. Water in my fist, heavy and cold.
The raft lurched. The eel was under us again, lifting, and this time it kept lifting, and the raft tilted, and Skritch went sliding across the boards towards the edge with his claws out, scrabbling.
“Ilsa! The snow!”
She didn’t ask why. That’s the thing about Ilsa. She had the bag open and the jar out and she smashed it on the boards, and for one second there was a blizzard on the ferry, a fist of snow going everywhere, flakes in my face, and the sparks that came off it were white. White and slow and cold, colder than her light, cold like the frost on my window the night the lantern went out.
Left hand. I took them.
And I had the river in my right hand and the cold in my left, and I don’t know how I knew. I just knew.
I put them together.
It didn’t flash. It cracked. A sound like a whip, like a frozen branch snapping, and what I was holding was a ball of ice as clear as glass, and so cold my teeth hurt from it.
I threw it at the water where the eel’s back was.
The river froze.
Not all of it. But a lot. The ice went out from where the ball hit like a hand opening, with a sound like a hundred windows breaking, across and across, thick and white and solid, and the eel’s back was in it. Locked. A great black loop of it, stuck up out of the ice like a bridge, and the ice went round it and held it there, and for a second nothing moved.
Then the eel moved. It heaved. The whole sheet of ice groaned and didn’t break.
“Go,” said the ferrywoman. “Now. Walk. Don’t run.”
The ice had the raft too. We climbed over the rail onto it, and it held, and we walked.
I’d like to tell you I walked. I slid. Skritch went flat on his belly and went across like he’d been born on ice, which he probably had. Ilsa held my arm, or I held hers. Behind us the eel heaved and the ice groaned, and the ferrywoman stood on her raft with both hands on the water and said her word, over and over, and I understood she was holding it. Holding the push, against the ice, keeping the raft from going over.
Thirty paces. Twenty. The ice getting thinner, going grey, water on top of it.
Ten.
The bank.
I went up it on my hands and knees and lay down in the mud on the far side of the river, under the first black tree, and I couldn’t feel my right arm at all, and not much of my left.
RECIPES (so far)
- Fire + fire = BIG flash. Lost eyebrows. Do not repeat.
- Fire + light = WHITE fire. Burns the Quiet. Burns nothing else. Lasts till morning.
- Frost + river = ICE. A lot of it. Freezes eels. Freezes me.
Ilsa rubbed my hands. She didn’t ask, she just did it, sitting in the mud with my white fingers between hers, and after a while the pins and needles came. Most of the way. Two fingers on my left hand, the little one and the one next to it, stayed white and stayed nothing, and I bent them to show her they worked, and didn’t say they couldn’t feel her.
Out on the river, the ice was going. Breaking up in slabs, going brown, and the eel’s back going down with it, slow, under. The ferrywoman had got her raft loose. She stood on it, a long way out, and looked at us, and then she raised one hand. Not a wave. Just a hand up. Then she pushed off, and went back the way she’d come.
“She’s going to tell people about that,” said Ilsa.
“Let her.”
“She’ll say, ‘a boy froze my river’.”
“Nobody’ll believe her.”
“I wouldn’t believe her,” said Ilsa, “and I was there.”
Skritch had gone up the bank to look at the trees. He came back down slowly, and he didn’t say anything, and that’s how I knew.
I sat up.
The road went in under the thorns, black and narrow. And twenty paces up it, where the trees started, standing in a row in the dark with their hands in their pockets, were three men in long grey coats.
Masks. One of them taller than the others.
They’d been on this side already. They’d been on this side the whole time. They’d stood under the trees and watched the eel and the ice and the three of us crawling up the bank, and they hadn’t moved.
The tall one raised a hand. The way the ferrywoman had. Just up.
Then they turned, all three, and walked into the Thornwood ahead of us, and the dark took them.
They weren’t chasing us any more.
They were waiting. And that was worse.